The Great Gatsby
of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American
capitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves
to be.
In addition to all these I can remember that Faustina O’Brien came
there at least once and the Baedeker girls and young Brewer, who had
his nose shot off in the war, and Mr. Albrucksburger and Miss Haag,
his fiancée, and Ardita Fitz-Peters and Mr. P. Jewett, once head of
the American Legion, and Miss Claudia Hip, with a man reputed to be
her chauffeur, and a prince of something, whom we called Duke, and
whose name, if I ever knew it, I have forgotten.
All these people came to Gatsby’s house in the summer.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
At nine o’clock, one morning late in July, Gatsby’s gorgeous car
lurched up the rocky drive to my door and gave out a burst of melody
from its three-noted horn.
It was the first time he had called on me, though I had gone to two of
his parties, mounted in his hydroplane, and, at his urgent invitation,
made frequent use of his beach.
“Good morning, old sport. You’re having lunch with me today and I
thought we’d ride up together.”
He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that
resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American—that comes,
I suppose, with the absence of lifting work in youth and, even more,
with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games. This quality
was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape
of restlessness. He was never quite still; there was always a tapping
foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand.
He saw me looking with admiration at his car.
“It’s pretty, isn’t it, old sport?” He jumped off to give me a better
view. “Haven’t you ever seen it before?”
I’d seen it. Everybody had seen it. It was a rich cream colour, bright
with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with
triumphant hatboxes and supper-boxes and toolboxes, and terraced with
a labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down
behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory,
we started to town.
I had talked with him perhaps half a dozen times in the past month and
found, to my disappointment, that he had little to say. So my first
impression, that he was a person of some undefined consequence, had
gradually faded and he had become simply the proprietor of an
elaborate roadhouse next door.
And then came that disconcerting ride. We hadn’t reached West Egg
village before Gatsby began leaving his elegant sentences unfinished
and slapping himself indecisively on the knee of his caramel-coloured
suit.
“Look here, old sport,” he broke out surprisingly, “what’s your
opinion of me, anyhow?”
A little overwhelmed, I began the generalized evasions which that
question deserves.
“Well, I’m going to tell you something about my life,” he interrupted.
“I don’t want you to get a wrong idea of me from all these stories you
hear.”
So he was aware of the bizarre accusations that flavoured conversation
in his halls.
“I’ll tell you God’s truth.” His right hand suddenly ordered divine
retribution to stand by. “I am the son of some wealthy people in the
Middle West—all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at
Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many
years. It is a family tradition.”
He looked at me sideways—and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he
was lying. He hurried the phrase “educated at Oxford,” or swallowed
it, or choked on it, as though it had bothered him before. And with
this doubt, his whole statement fell to pieces, and I wondered if
there wasn’t something a little sinister about him, after all.
“What part of the Middle West?” I inquired casually.
“San Francisco.”
“I see.”
“My family all died and I came into a good deal of money.”
His voice was solemn, as if the memory of that sudden extinction of a
clan still haunted him. For a moment I suspected that he was pulling
my leg, but a glance at him convinced me otherwise.
“After that I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of
Europe—Paris, Venice, Rome—collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting
big game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to
forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago.”
With an effort I managed to restrain my incredulous laughter. The very
phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that
of a turbaned “character” leaking sawdust at every pore as he pursued
a tiger through the Bois de Boulogne.
“Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very
hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life. I accepted a
commission as first lieutenant when it began. In the Argonne Forest I
took the remains of my machine-gun battalion so far forward that there
was a half mile gap on either side of us where the infantry couldn’t
advance. We stayed there two days and two nights, a hundred and thirty
men with sixteen Lewis guns, and when the infantry came up at last
they found the insignia of three German divisions among the piles of
dead. I was promoted to be a major, and every Allied government gave
me a decoration—even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the
Adriatic Sea!”
Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them—with his
smile. The smile comprehended Montenegro’s troubled history and
sympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. It
appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances which had
elicited this tribute from Montenegro’s warm little heart. My
incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming
hastily through a dozen magazines.
He reached in his pocket, and a piece of metal, slung on a ribbon,
fell into my palm.
“That’s the one from Montenegro.”
To my astonishment, the thing had an authentic look. “Orderi di
Danilo,” ran the circular legend, “Montenegro, Nicolas Rex.”
“Turn it.”
“Major Jay Gatsby,” I read, “For Valour Extraordinary.”
“Here’s another thing I always carry. A souvenir of Oxford days. It
was taken in Trinity Quad—the man on my left is now the Earl of
Doncaster.”
It was a photograph of half a dozen young men in blazers loafing in an
archway through which were visible a host of spires. There was Gatsby,
looking a little, not much, younger—with a cricket bat in his hand.
Then it was all true. I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace
on the Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with
their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart.
“I’m going to make a big request of you today,” he said, pocketing his
souvenirs with satisfaction, “so I thought you ought to know something
about me. I didn’t want you to think I was just some nobody. You see,
I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there
trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.” He hesitated.
“You’ll hear about it this afternoon.”
“At lunch?”
“No, this afternoon. I happened to find out that you’re taking Miss
Baker to tea.”
“Do you mean you’re in love with Miss Baker?”
“No, old sport, I’m not. But Miss Baker has kindly consented to speak
to you about this matter.”
I hadn’t the faintest idea what “this matter” was, but I was more
annoyed than interested. I hadn’t asked Jordan to tea in order to
discuss Mr. Jay Gatsby. I was sure the request would be something
utterly fantastic, and for a moment I was sorry I’d ever set foot upon
his overpopulated lawn.
He wouldn’t say another word. His correctness grew on him as we neared
the city. We passed Port Roosevelt, where there was a glimpse of
red-belted oceangoing ships, and sped along a cobbled slum lined with
the dark, undeserted saloons of the faded-gilt nineteen-hundreds.
Then the valley of ashes opened out on both sides of us, and I had a
glimpse of Mrs. Wilson straining at the garage pump with panting
vitality as we went by.
With fenders spread like wings we scattered light through half
Astoria—only half, for as we twisted among the pillars of the elevated
I heard the familiar “jug-jug-spat!” of a motorcycle, and a frantic
policeman rode alongside.
“All right, old sport,” called Gatsby. We slowed down. Taking a white
card from his wallet, he waved it before the man’s eyes.
“Right you are,” agreed the policeman, tipping his cap. “Know you next
time, Mr. Gatsby. Excuse me!”
“What was that?” I inquired. “The picture of Oxford?”
“I was able to do the commissioner a favour once, and he sends me a
Christmas card every year.”
Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a
constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across
the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of
nonolfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always
the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the
mystery and the beauty in the world.
A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two
carriages with drawn blinds, and by more cheerful carriages for
friends. The friends looked out at us with the tragic eyes and short
upper lips of southeastern Europe, and I was glad that the sight of
Gatsby’s splendid car was included in their sombre holiday. As we
crossed Blackwell’s Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white
chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl. I
laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in
haughty rivalry.
“Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge,” I thought;
“anything at all …”
Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Roaring noon. In a well-fanned Forty-second Street cellar I met Gatsby
for lunch. Blinking away the brightness of the street outside, my eyes
picked him out obscurely in the anteroom, talking to another man.
“Mr. Carraway, this is my friend Mr. Wolfshiem.”
A small, flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two
fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril. After a
moment I discovered his tiny eyes in the half-darkness.
“—So I took one look at him,” said Mr. Wolfshiem, shaking my hand
earnestly, “and what do you think I did?”
“What?” I inquired politely.
But evidently he was not addressing me, for he dropped my hand and
covered Gatsby with his expressive nose.
“I handed the money to Katspaugh and I said: ‘All right, Katspaugh,
don’t pay him a penny till he shuts his mouth.’ He shut it then and
there.”
Gatsby took an arm of each of us and moved forward into the
restaurant, whereupon Mr. Wolfshiem swallowed a new sentence he was
starting and lapsed into a somnambulatory abstraction.
“Highballs?” asked the head waiter.
“This is a nice restaurant here,” said Mr. Wolfshiem, looking at the
presbyterian nymphs on the ceiling. “But I like across the street
better!”
“Yes, highballs,” agreed Gatsby, and then to Mr. Wolfshiem: “It’s too
hot over there.”
“Hot and small—yes,” said Mr. Wolfshiem, “but full of memories.”
“What place is that?” I asked.
“The old Metropole.”
“The old Metropole,” brooded Mr. Wolfshiem gloomily. “Filled with
faces dead and gone. Filled with friends gone now forever. I can’t
forget so long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there. It
was six of us at the table, and Rosy had eat and drunk a lot all
evening. When it was almost morning the waiter came up to him with a
funny look and says somebody wants to speak to him outside. ‘All
right,’ says Rosy, and begins to get up, and I pulled him down in his
chair.
“ ‘Let the bastards come in here if they want you, Rosy, but don’t