The Great

Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, Till she cry ‘Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!’

—THOMAS PARKE D’INVILLIERS

The Great Gatsby

Chapter 1

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave

me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my

mind ever since.

‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told

me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world

haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’

He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been

unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I

understood that he meant a great deal more than

that. In consequence I’m in clined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in

college I was unjustly accused of being a politician,

because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild,

unknown men. Most of the con fidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I

realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quiver ing on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the

terms in which they express them are usually

plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am

still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my fa-

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ther snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out

unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come

to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be

founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I

wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of

moral attention forever; I want ed no more riotous excursions with privileged

glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from

my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffect ed scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something

gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to

the promises of life, as if he were related to one of

those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.

This responsiveness had

nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative

temperament’— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is

what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my

interest in the abortive sorrows and short winded elations of men.

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people

in this middle-western city for three generations. The Car-

The Great Gatsby

raways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the ac tual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father car ries on today.

I never saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to

look like him—with special reference to the rather

hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father’s office. I

graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I

participated in that delayed Teutonic mi gration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the

counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless.

Instead of being the warm center of the world the

middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business.

Everybody I knew was in the bond

business so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, ‘Why—ye es’ with very grave, hesitant faces.

Father agreed to finance me for a year and after

various delays I came east, perma nently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two. The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office sug gested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went

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out to the country alone. I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old

Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and mut tered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. ‘How do you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helpless ly.

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no

longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler.

He had casu ally conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of

leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in

fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life

was beginning over again with the summer.

There was so much to read for one thing and so

much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giv ing air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mae cenas knew.

And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the ‘Yale News’—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

The Great Gatsby

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented

a house in one of the strangest communities in North Ameri ca. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual

formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most

domesticated body of salt water in the Western

Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound.

They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in

the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly

overhead.

To the wingless a more arresting

phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular

except shape and size.

I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of

the two, though this is a most superficial tag to

express the bi zarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed

between two huge places that rented for twelve or

fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a

colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imi

tation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a

tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard

of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more

than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby’s

mansion. Or rather, as I didn’t know Mr. Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentle man of that name. My

own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small

eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a

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view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dol lars a month.

Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of

fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and

the history of the summer really begins on the

evening I drove over there to have dinner with the

Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I’d known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.

Her husband, among various physical

accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a

national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that

everything afterward savors of anti-cli max. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for

reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come east

in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for

instance he’d brought down a string of polo ponies

from Lake Forest. It was hard to real ize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.

Why they came east I don’t know. They had spent a

year in France, for no particular reason, and then

drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people

played polo and were rich together. This was a

permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seek ing a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

The Great Gatsby

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I

drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarce ly knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial man sion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front

door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—final ly when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.

He had changed since his New Haven years. Now

he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a

rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two

shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance

over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enor mous leverage—a cruel body.

His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to

the im pression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts. ‘Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final,’

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he seemed to say, ‘just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.’ We were in the same

Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I

always had the impression that he approved of me

and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.

‘I’ve got a nice place here,’ he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.

Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad

flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore.

‘It belonged to Demaine the oil man.’ He turned me

around again, politely and abruptly. ‘We’ll go inside.’ We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, mak ing a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The only completely stationary object in the room

was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored

balloon. They were both in white and their dresses

were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been

blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to

10 The Great Gatsby

the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a pic ture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She

was extended full length at her end of the divan,

completely motionless and with her chin raised a little as if she were balancing something on it which was

quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apol ogy for having disturbed her by coming in.

The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she

leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression— then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room. ‘I’m p-paralyzed with happiness.’

She laughed again, as if she said something very

witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had.

She hinted in a mur mur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to

make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism

that made it no less charming.)

At any rate Miss Baker’s lips fluttered, she nodded

at me almost imperceptibly and then quickly tipped

her head back again—the object she was balancing

had obviously tottered a little and given her

something of a fright. Again a sort of

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apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me. I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me ques tions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrange ment of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth—but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered ‘Listen,’ a prom ise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day

on my way east and how a dozen people had sent

their love through me.

‘Do they miss me?’ she cried ecstatically. ‘The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the

left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath and there’s a per sistent wail all night along the North Shore.’

‘How gorgeous! Let’s go back, Tom. Tomorrow!’

Then she added irrelevantly, ‘You ought to see the baby.’ ‘I’d like to.’

‘She’s asleep. She’s two years old. Haven’t you

ever seen her?’

‘Never.’ ‘Well, you ought to see her. She’s——‘ Tom Buchanan who had been hovering restlessly

about the room stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.

12 The Great Gatsby

‘What you doing, Nick?’ ‘I’m a bond man.’ ‘Who with?’ I told him. ‘Never heard of them,’ he remarked decisively. This annoyed me. ‘You will,’ I answered shortly. ‘You will if you stay in

the East.’

‘Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry,’ he said,

glanc ing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. ‘I’d be a God Damned fool to live any where else.’

At this point Miss Baker said ‘Absolutely!’ with such

suddenness that I started—it was the first word she uttered since I came into the room. Evidently it

surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned

and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.

‘I’m stiff,’ she complained, ‘I’ve been lying on that

sofa for as long as I can remember.’

‘Don’t look at me,’ Daisy retorted. ‘I’ve been trying

to get you to New York all afternoon.’

‘No, thanks,’ said Miss Baker to the four cocktails

just in from the pantry, ‘I’m absolutely in training.’

Her host looked at her incredulously. ‘You are!’ He took down his drink as if it were a

drop in the bottom of a glass. ‘How you ever get

anything done is beyond me.’

I looked at Miss Baker wondering what it was she

‘got done.’ I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-

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breasted girl, with an erect carriage which she

accentuated by throwing her body backward at the

shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained

eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discon tented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before.

‘You live in West Egg,’ she remarked

contemptuously. ‘I know somebody there.’

‘I don’t know a single——‘ ‘You must know Gatsby.’ ‘Gatsby?’ demanded Daisy. ‘What Gatsby?’ Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner

was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively un der mine Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.

Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their

hips the two young women preceded us out onto a

rosy-colored porch open toward the sunset where

four candles flickered on the table in the diminished

wind.

‘Why CANDLES?’ objected Daisy, frowning. She

snapped them out with her fingers. ‘In two weeks it’ll be the longest day in the year.’ She looked at us all

radiantly. ‘Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the

longest day in the year and then miss it.’

‘We ought to plan something,’ yawned Miss Baker,

sit ting down at the table as if she were getting into bed. ‘All right,’ said Daisy. ‘What’ll we plan?’ She turned to me helplessly. ‘What do people plan?’

14 The Great Gatsby

Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an

awed ex pression on her little finger.

‘Look!’ she complained. ‘I hurt it.’ We all looked—the knuckle was black and blue.

‘You did it, Tom,’ she said accusingly. ‘I know you didn’t mean to but you DID do it. That’s what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great big hulking physical specimen of a——‘

‘I hate that word hulking,’ objected Tom crossly,

‘even in kidding.’

‘Hulking,’ insisted Daisy.

Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once,

unobtru sively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire. They were here—and they accepted Tom and me, making only a po lite pleasant

effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away.

It was sharply different from the West where an evening was hur ried from phase to phase toward its close in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.

‘You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy,’ I confessed

on my second glass of corky but rather impressive

claret. ‘Can’t you talk about crops or something?’

I meant nothing in particular by this remark but it

was taken up in an unexpected way.

‘Civilization’s going to pieces,’ broke out Tom

violently. Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 15

‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things.

Have you read ‘The Rise of the Coloured Empires’ by this man God dard?’

‘Why, no,’ I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

‘Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it.

The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be ut terly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.’ ‘Tom’s getting very profound,’ said Daisy with an expres sion of unthoughtful sadness. ‘He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we——‘ ‘Well, these books are all scientific,’ insisted Tom, glanc ing at her impatiently. ‘This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these

other races will have control of things.’ ‘We’ve got to beat them down,’ whispered Daisy, wink ing ferociously toward the fervent sun.

‘You ought to live in California—’ began Miss Baker

but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair. ‘This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are and you are and——’ After an infinitesimal hesitation he in cluded Daisy with a slight nod and she winked at me again. ‘—and we’ve produced all the things that go to make civili zation—oh, science and art and all that. Do you see?’ There was something pathetic in his concentration as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more. When, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned toward me. ‘I’ll tell you a family secret,’ she whispered enthusiasti-

16 The Great Gatsby

cally. ‘It’s about the butler’s nose. Do you want to hear about the butler’s nose?’

‘That’s why I came over tonight.’ ‘Well, he wasn’t always a butler; he used to be the

sil ver polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people. He had to polish it from morning till night until finally it began to affect his nose— —‘

‘Things went from bad to worse,’ suggested Miss

Baker. ‘Yes. Things went from bad to worse until finally he had to give up his position.’

For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic

affec tion upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened—then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.

The butler came back and murmured something

close to Tom’s ear whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair and without a word went inside. As if

his absence quickened something within her Daisy

leaned forward again, her voice glowing and singing.

‘I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me

of a— of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn’t he?’ She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation. ‘An absolute rose?’

This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose.

She was only extemporizing but a stirring warmth

flowed from her as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the

table and excused herself and

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went into the house.

Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance

conscious ly devoid of meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said ‘Sh!’ in a warning voice. A subdued im passioned murmur was audible in the room beyond and Miss Baker leaned forward, unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether.

‘This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbor——’ I

said.

‘Don’t talk. I want to hear what happens.’ ‘Is something happening?’ I inquired innocently.

‘You mean to say you don’t know?’ said Miss Baker, hon estly surprised. ‘I thought everybody knew.’

‘I don’t.’ ‘Why——’ she said hesitantly, ‘Tom’s got some

woman in New York.’

‘Got some woman?’ I repeated blankly.

Miss Baker nodded. ‘She might have the decency not to telephone him

at din ner-time. Don’t you think?’

Almost before I had grasped her meaning there

was the flutter of a dress and the crunch of leather

boots and Tom and Daisy were back at the table. ‘It couldn’t be helped!’ cried Daisy with tense gayety.

She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and

then at me and continued: ‘I looked outdoors for a

minute and it’s very romantic outdoors. There’s a bird

on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come

over on the Cunard

18 The Great Gatsby

or White Star Line. He’s singing away——’ her voice sang ‘——It’s romantic, isn’t it, Tom?’

‘Very romantic,’ he said, and then miserably to me:

‘If it’s light enough after dinner I want to take you

down to the stables.’

The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy

shook her head decisively at Tom the subject of the

stables, in fact all subjects, vanished into air. Among

the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at every one and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn’t guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking but I doubt if even Miss Baker who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy skepticism was able utterly to put this fifth guest’s shrill me tallic urgency out of mind.

To a certain

temperament the situation might have seemed

intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone

immediately for the police.

The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned

again.

Tom and Miss Baker, with several feet of

twilight between them strolled back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while

trying to look pleasantly in terested and a little deaf I followed Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. In its deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee.

Daisy took her face in her hands, as if feeling its

love ly shape, and her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl.

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‘We don’t know each other very well, Nick,’ she

said suddenly. ‘Even if we are cousins. You didn’t

come to my wedding.’

‘I wasn’t back from the war.’

‘That’s true.’ She hesitated. ‘Well, I’ve had a very

bad time, Nick, and I’m pretty cynical about everything.’ Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn’t say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter.

‘I suppose she talks, and—eats, and everything.’

‘Oh, yes.’ She looked at me absently. ‘Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?’

‘Very much.’ ‘It’ll show you how I’ve gotten to feel about—things.

Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an

utterly abandoned feeling and asked the nurse right

away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a

fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’ ‘You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow,’ she went

on in a convinced way. ‘Everybody thinks so—the most ad vanced people. And I KNOW. I’ve been

everywhere and seen everything and done

everything.’ Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom’s, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. ‘Sophisticated—God, I’m sophisticated!’ The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my

20 The Great Gatsby

attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the

whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emo tion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged. Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light. Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the long couch and she read aloud to him from the ‘Saturday Evening Post’—the words, murmurous and uninflected, running together in a sooth ing tune. The lamp-light, bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms.

When we came in she held us silent for a moment

with a lifted hand.

‘To be continued,’ she said, tossing the magazine

on the table, ‘in our very next issue.’

Her body asserted itself with a restless movement

of her knee, and she stood up.

‘Ten o’clock,’ she remarked, apparently finding the

time on the ceiling. ‘Time for this good girl to go to bed.’ ‘Jordan’s going to play in the tournament tomorrow,’ ex plained Daisy, ‘over at Westchester.’

‘Oh,—you’re JORdan Baker.’ I knew now why her face was familiar—its pleasing

con temptuous expression had looked out at me from

many rotogravure pictures of the sporting life at

Asheville and

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Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgot ten long ago.

‘Good night,’ she said softly. ‘Wake me at eight,

won’t you.’

‘If you’ll get up.’ ‘I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon.’ ‘Of

course you will,’ confirmed Daisy. ‘In fact I think I’ll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I’ll sort of—oh—fling you together. You know—lock you up acci dentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing——‘

‘Good night,’ called Miss Baker from the stairs. ‘I

haven’t heard a word.’

‘She’s a nice girl,’ said Tom after a moment. ‘They

oughtn’t to let her run around the country this way.’

‘Who oughtn’t to?’ inquired Daisy coldly. ‘Her family.’ ‘Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old.

Be sides, Nick’s going to look after her, aren’t you, Nick? She’s going to spend lots of week-ends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be very good for her.’

Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment

in si lence.

‘Is she from New York?’ I asked quickly. ‘From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed

togeth er there. Our beautiful white——‘

‘Did you give Nick a little heart to heart talk on the

ve randa?’ demanded Tom suddenly.

22 The Great Gatsby

‘Did

I?’ She looked at me. ‘I can’t seem to

remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic

race. Yes, I’m sure we did.

It sort of crept up on us

and first thing you know——‘

‘Don’t believe everything you hear, Nick,’ he

advised me.

I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a

few minutes later I got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood side by side in a cheerful square of light.

As I started my motor Daisy

peremptorily called ‘Wait!

‘I forgot to ask you something, and it’s important.

We heard you were engaged to a girl out West.’

‘That’s right,’ corroborated Tom kindly. ‘We heard

that you were engaged.’

‘It’s libel. I’m too poor.’ ‘But we heard it,’ insisted Daisy, surprising me by

open ing up again in a flower-like way. ‘We heard it from three people so it must be true.’

Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I

wasn’t even vaguely engaged. The fact that gossip

had published the banns was one of the reasons I

had come east. You can’t stop going with an old

friend on account of rumors and on the other hand I had no intention of being rumored into marriage.

Their interest rather touched me and made them less

remotely rich—nevertheless, I was confused and a

little dis gusted as I drove away. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house,

child in arms—but apparently there were no such intentions in her head. As for Tom, the fact that he

‘had some woman in New York’ was

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 23

really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the

edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism

no longer nourished his peremptory heart.

Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs

and in front of wayside garages, where new red

gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I

reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud

bright night with wings beating in the trees and a

persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wa vered across the moonlight and turning my head to watch it I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my

neighbor’s mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars.

Something in his leisurely move ments and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to deter mine what share was his of our local heavens.

I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned

him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction.

But I didn’t call to him for he gave a sudden intimation

that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was

trembling.

Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and

distinguished nothing except a single green light,

minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had van-

24 The Great Gatsby

ished, and I was alone again in the

unquiet darkness.Free eBooks at Planet

eBook.com 25

Chapter 2

About half way between West Egg and New York the

motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs

beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away

from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like

wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens

where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcen dent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a

line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and

immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak

dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face

but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow

spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose.

Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or

forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain,

brood on over the sol-

26 The Great Gatsby

emn dumping ground.

The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a

small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can

stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour.

There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress.

The fact that he had one was insisted upon

wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about,

chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was

curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car.

‘We’re getting off!’ he insisted. ‘I want you to meet

my girl.’

I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon and

his determination to have my company bordered on

violence.

The supercilious assumption was that on

Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do.

I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road un der Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare. The only

building in sight was a small block of yellow brick

sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of

compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous

to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it

contained was for rent and another was an all-night

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 27

restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third

was a garage—Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside.

The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only

car vis ible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blonde, spiritless man, anae mic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes.

‘Hello, Wilson, old man,’ said Tom, slapping him

jovially on the shoulder. ‘How’s business?’

‘I can’t complain,’ answered Wilson unconvincingly.

‘When are you going to sell me that car?’

‘Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.’ ‘Works pretty slow, don’t he?’ ‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Tom coldly. ‘And if you feel

that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.’ ‘I don’t mean that,’ explained Wilson quickly. ‘I just meant——‘

His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently

around the garage. Then I heard footsteps on a stairs

and in a mo ment the thickish figure of a woman

blocked out the light from the office door. She was in

the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can.

Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue

crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty

28 The Great Gatsby

but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually

smouldering.

She smiled slowly and walking through

her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice:

‘Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can

sit down.’

‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Wilson hurriedly and went

toward the little office, mingling immediately with the

cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to

Tom.

‘I want to see you,’ said Tom intently. ‘Get on the

next train.’

‘All right.’ ‘I’ll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.’

She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door. We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row along the rail road track.

‘Terrible place, isn’t it,’ said Tom, exchanging a

frown with Doctor Eckleburg.

‘Awful.’ ‘It does her good to get away.’

‘Doesn’t her husband object?’ ‘Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in

New Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 29

York. He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.’ So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up togeth er to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train.

She had changed her dress to a brown figured mus lin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom

helped her to the platform in New York. At the

news-stand she bought a copy of ‘Town Tattle’ and a

moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug

store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume.

Upstairs, in the solemn echo ing drive she let four taxi

cabs drive away before she selected a new one,

lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glow ing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass.

‘I want to get one of those dogs,’ she said

earnestly. ‘I want to get one for the apartment.

They’re nice to have—a dog.’

We backed up to a grey old man who bore an

absurd re semblance to John D. Rockefeller. In a basket, swung from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an inde terminate breed.

‘What kind are they?’ asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly as

he came to the taxi-window.

‘All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?’ ‘I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t

suppose you got that kind?’

30 The Great Gatsby

The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged

in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back

of the neck.

‘That’s no police dog,’ said Tom. ‘No, it’s not exactly a polICE dog,’ said the man

with disappointment in his voice. ‘It’s more of an

airedale.’ He passed his hand over the brown

wash-rag of a back. ‘Look at that coat. Some coat.

That’s a dog that’ll never bother you with catching

cold.’

‘I think it’s cute,’ said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically.

‘How much is it?’

‘That dog?’ He looked at it admiringly. ‘That dog will

cost you ten dollars.’

The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale

con cerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs. Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture. ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asked delicately.

‘That dog? That dog’s a boy.’ ‘It’s a bitch,’ said Tom decisively. ‘Here’s your

money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it.’

We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft,

almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon

that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a great

flock of white sheep turn the corner.

‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘I have to leave you here.’ ‘No, you don’t,’ interposed Tom quickly. ‘Myrtle’ll be

hurt if you don’t come up to the apartment. Won’t you, Myrtle?’

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 31

‘Come on,’ she urged. ‘I’ll telephone my sister

Cathe rine. She’s said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.’

‘Well, I’d like to, but——‘ We went on, cutting back again over the Park

toward the West Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab

stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs. Wil son gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in.

‘I’m going to have the McKees come up,’ she

announced as we rose in the elevator. ‘And of course I got to call up my sister, too.’

The apartment was on the top floor—a small living

room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath. The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tap estried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over

scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of

Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged

photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred

rock. Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room. Several

old copies of ‘Town Tattle ‘lay on the table together

with a copy of ‘Simon Called Peter’ and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson

was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to

which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed

apathetically

32 The Great Gatsby

in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door. I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had disap peared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of ‘Simon Called Peter’—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn’t make any sense to me.

Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs.

Wil son and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door.

The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of

about thirty with a solid sticky bob of red hair and a

complexion powdered milky white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more

rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the

restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about there was an

incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jin gled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so

possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she

lived here. But when I asked her she laughed

immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told

me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel.

Mr. McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat

below. Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 33

He had just shaved for there was a white spot of lather on his cheekbone and he was most respectful in his greeting to everyone in the room. He informed me that he was in the ‘artistic game’ and I gathered later that he was a photogra pher and had made the dim enlargement of Mrs.

Wilson’s mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall. His wife was shrill, languid, handsome and

horrible. She told me with pride that her husband had photographed her a hundred and twenty-seven times since they had been mar ried.

Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time

be fore and was now attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream colored chiffon, which gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room. With the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was con verted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.

‘My dear,’ she told her sister in a high mincing

shout, ‘most of these fellas will cheat you every time.

All they think of is money. I had a woman up here last week to look at my feet and when she gave me the bill you’d of thought she had my appendicitus out.’

‘What was the name of the woman?’ asked Mrs.

McKee. ‘Mrs. Eberhardt. She goes around looking at people’s feet in their own homes.’

34 The Great Gatsby

‘I like your dress,’ remarked Mrs. McKee, ‘I think it’s

adorable.’

Mrs. Wilson rejected the compliment by raising her

eye brow in disdain.

‘It’s just a crazy old thing,’ she said. ‘I just slip it on

some times when I don’t care what I look like.’

‘But it looks wonderful on you, if you know what I

mean,’ pursued Mrs. McKee. ‘If Chester could only

get you in that pose I think he could make something

of it.’

We all looked in silence at Mrs. Wilson who

removed a strand of hair from over her eyes and

looked back at us with a brilliant smile. Mr. McKee

regarded her intently with his head on one side and then moved his hand back and forth slowly in front of his face.

‘I should change the light,’ he said after a moment.

‘I’d like to bring out the modelling of the features. And I’d try to get hold of all the back hair.’

‘I wouldn’t think of changing the light,’ cried Mrs.

McK ee. ‘I think it’s——‘

Her husband said ‘SH!’ and we all looked at the

subject again whereupon Tom Buchanan yawned

audibly and got to his feet.

‘You McKees have something to drink,’ he said.

‘Get some more ice and mineral water, Myrtle, before everybody goes to sleep.’

‘I told that boy about the ice.’ Myrtle raised her

eyebrows in despair at the shiftlessness of the lower orders. ‘These people! You have to keep after them all the time.’ She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 35

flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs

awaited her orders there.

‘I’ve done some nice things out on Long Island,’

asserted Mr. McKee.

Tom looked at him blankly.

‘Two of them we have framed downstairs.’ ‘Two what?’ demanded Tom. ‘Two studies. One of them I call ‘Montauk

Point—the Gulls,’ and the other I call ‘Montauk Point—the Sea.’ ‘ The sister Catherine sat down beside me on the couch. ‘Do you live down on Long Island, too?’ she inquired. ‘I live at West Egg.’

‘Really? I was down there at a party about a month

ago. At a man named Gatsby’s. Do you know him?’ ‘I live next door to him.’

‘Well, they say he’s a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser

Wil helm’s. That’s where all his money comes from.’ ‘Really?’

She nodded. ‘I’m scared of him. I’d hate to have him get anything

on me.’

This absorbing information about my neighbor was

in terrupted by Mrs. McKee’s pointing suddenly at Catherine: ‘Chester, I think you could do something with HER,’ she broke out, but Mr. McKee only nodded in a bored way and turned his attention to Tom.

‘I’d like to do more work on Long Island if I could

get the entry. All I ask is that they should give me a start.’

36 The Great Gatsby

‘Ask Myrtle,’ said Tom, breaking into a short shout

of laughter as Mrs. Wilson entered with a tray. ‘She’ll give you a letter of introduction, won’t you, Myrtle?’

‘Do what?’ she asked, startled. ‘You’ll give McKee a letter of introduction to your

hus band, so he can do some studies of him.’ His lips moved silently for a moment as he invented. ‘ ‘George B. Wilson at the Gasoline Pump,’ or something like that.’

Catherine leaned close to me and whispered in my

ear: ‘Neither of them can stand the person they’re married to.’ ‘Can’t they?’

‘Can’t STAND them.’ She looked at Myrtle and then

at Tom. ‘What I say is, why go on living with them if

they can’t stand them? If I was them I’d get a divorce and get married to each other right away.’

‘Doesn’t she like Wilson either?’ The answer to this was unexpected. It came from

Myrtle who had overheard the question and it was violent and ob scene.

‘You see?’ cried Catherine triumphantly.

She

lowered her voice again. ‘It’s really his wife that’s

keeping them apart.

She’s a Catholic and they don’t

believe in divorce.’

Daisy was not a Catholic and I was a little shocked

at the elaborateness of the lie.

‘When they do get married,’ continued Catherine,

‘they’re going west to live for a while until it blows over.’ ‘It’d be more discreet to go to Europe.’

‘Oh, do you like Europe?’ she exclaimed

surprisingly. ‘I just got back from Monte Carlo.’

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 37

‘Really.’ ‘Just last year. I went over there with another girl.’ ‘Stay long?’

‘No, we just went to Monte Carlo and back. We

went by way of Marseilles. We had over twelve

hundred dollars when we started but we got gypped

out of it all in two days in the private rooms. We had an awful time getting back, I can tell you. God, how I hated that town!’

The late afternoon sky bloomed in the window for a

mo ment like the blue honey of the

Mediterranean—then the shrill voice of Mrs. McKee

called me back into the room.

‘I almost made a mistake, too,’ she declared

vigorously. ‘I almost married a little kyke who’d been after me for years. I knew he was below me.

Everybody kept saying to me: ‘Lu cille, that man’s way below you!’ But if I hadn’t met Chester, he’d of got me sure.’

‘Yes, but listen,’ said Myrtle Wilson, nodding her

head up and down, ‘at least you didn’t marry him.’

‘I know I didn’t.’ ‘Well, I married him,’ said Myrtle, ambiguously. ‘And

that’s the difference between your case and mine.’ ‘Why did you, Myrtle?’ demanded Catherine. ‘Nobody forced you to.’

Myrtle considered. ‘I married him because I thought he was a

gentleman,’ she said finally. ‘I thought he knew something about breed ing, but he wasn’t fit to lick my shoe.’

‘You were crazy about him for a while,’ said Catherine. ‘Crazy about him!’ cried Myrtle

incredulously. ‘Who said

38 The Great Gatsby

I was crazy about him? I never was any more crazy about him than I was about that man there.’

She pointed suddenly at me, and every one looked

at me accusingly. I tried to show by my expression

that I had played no part in her past.

‘The only CRAZY I was was when I married him. I

knew right away I made a mistake. He borrowed

somebody’s best suit to get married in and never

even told me about it, and the man came after it one day when he was out. She looked around to see who was listening: ‘ ‘Oh, is that your suit?’ I said. ‘This is the first I ever heard about it.’ But I gave it to him and then I lay down and cried to beat the band all af ternoon.’

‘She really ought to get away from him,’ resumed

Cath erine to me. ‘They’ve been living over that garage for eleven years. And Tom’s the first sweetie she ever had.’

The bottle of whiskey—a second one—was now in

con stant demand by all present, excepting Catherine who ‘felt just as good on nothing at all.’ Tom rang for

the janitor and sent him for some celebrated

sandwiches, which were a complete supper in

themselves. I wanted to get out and walk eastward

toward the park through the soft twilight but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild stri dent argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into

my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow

windows must have contributed their share of human

secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening

streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering.

I was within and without, si multaneously enchanted

and repelled by the inexhaustible

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 39

variety of life.

Myrtle pulled her chair close to mine, and suddenly

her warm breath poured over me the story of her first meeting with Tom.

‘It was on the two little seats facing each other that

are always the last ones left on the train. I was going up to New York to see my sister and spend the night.

He had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes and I couldn’t keep my eyes off him but every time he

looked at me I had to pretend to be looking at the

advertisement over his head. When we came into the station he was next to me and his white shirt-front pressed against my arm—and so I told him I’d have to call a policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so excited that when I got into a taxi with him I didn’t hardly

know I wasn’t get ting into a subway train. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live

forever, you can’t live forever.’ ‘

She turned to Mrs. McKee and the room rang full of

her artificial laughter.

‘My dear,’ she cried, ‘I’m going to give you this

dress as soon as I’m through with it. I’ve got to get

another one to morrow. I’m going to make a list of all the things I’ve got to get. A massage and a wave and

a collar for the dog and one of those cute little

ash-trays where you touch a spring, and a wreath

with a black silk bow for mother’s grave that’ll last all summer. I got to write down a list so I won’t forget all the things I got to do.’

It was nine o’clock—almost immediately afterward I

looked at my watch and found it was ten. Mr. McKee was asleep on a chair with his fists clenched in his

lap, like a

40 The Great Gatsby

photograph of a man of action. Taking out my handkerchief I wiped from his cheek the remains of the spot of dried lath er that had worried me all the afternoon.

The little dog was sitting on the table looking with

blind eyes through the smoke and from time to time

groaning faintly. People disappeared, reappeared,

made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each

other, searched for each other, found each other a

few feet away. Some time toward midnight Tom

Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood face to face

discussing in impassioned voices whether Mrs. Wilson had any right to mention Daisy’s name.

‘Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!’ shouted Mrs. Wilson. ‘I’ll say

it whenever I want to! Daisy! Dai——‘

Making a short deft movement Tom Buchanan

broke her nose with his open hand.

Then there were bloody towels upon the bathroom

floor, and women’s voices scolding, and high over the confusion a long broken wail of pain. Mr. McKee

awoke from his doze and started in a daze toward the door. When he had gone half way he turned around and stared at the scene—his wife and Catherine

scolding and consoling as they stumbled here and

there among the crowded furniture with articles of aid, and the despairing figure on the couch bleeding flu ently and trying to spread a copy of ‘Town Tattle’ over the tapestry scenes of Versailles. Then Mr. McKee

turned and continued on out the door. Taking my hat from the chan delier I followed.

‘Come to lunch some day,’ he suggested, as we

groaned down in the elevator.

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 41

‘Where?’ ‘Anywhere.’ ‘Keep your hands off the lever,’ snapped the

elevator boy.

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Mr. McKee with dignity, ‘I

didn’t know I was touching it.’

‘All right,’ I agreed, ‘I’ll be glad to.’ … I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting

up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.

‘Beauty and the Beast … Loneliness … Old

Grocery Horse … Brook’n Bridge ….’

Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level

of the Pennsylvania Station, staring at the morning

‘Tribune’ and waiting for the four o’clock train.

42 The Great Gatsby

Chapter 3

There was music from my neighbor’s house through the

summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls

came and went like moths among the whisperings and the cham pagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cat aracts of foam.

On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city, between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his sta tion wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants including an extra gardener toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.

Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons

arrived from a fruiterer in New York—every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulp less halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour, if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb.

At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came

down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 43

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 sa lons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors and hair shorn 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 intro ductions 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 swift ly, 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,

44 The Great Gatsby

become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group and then excited with triumph glide on through the sea change of faces and voices and color 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 mov ing 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 invit ed. People were not invited—they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island and some how 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 be havior associated with amusement parks. 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

morn ing with a surprisingly formal note from his

employer—the honor 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

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 45

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 commut ing train. I was immediately struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a lit tle 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 vicin ity 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 where abouts 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

em barrassment when Jordan Baker came out of the house and stood at the head of the marble steps, leaning a little back ward 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 passers-by.

‘Hello!’ I roared, advancing toward her. My voice

seemed 46 The Great Gatsby

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 fi nals the week before.

‘You don’t know who we are,’ said one of the girls in

yel low, ‘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 re mark 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—

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 47

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

skepti cally; ‘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 look ing 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

testimo ny to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who found

little that it was

48 The Great Gatsby

necessary to whisper about in this world.

The first supper—there would be another one after

mid night—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 country side—East Egg condescending to West Egg, and carefully on guard against its spectroscopic gayety.

‘Let’s get out,’ whispered Jordan, after a somehow

waste ful 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, melan choly 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 Goth ic library, panelled with carved English oak, and probably transported complete from some ruin overseas. A stout, middle-aged man with enormous owl-eyed spec tacles was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 49

books. As we entered he wheeled excitedly around and ex amined Jordan from head to foot.

‘What do you think?’ he demanded impetuously. ‘About what?’ He waved his hand toward the book-shelves. ‘About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother

to as certain. 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 skepticism 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

answer ing.

‘I was brought by a woman named Roosevelt,’ he

con tinued. ‘Mrs. Claud Roosevelt. Do you know her? I met her

50 The Great Gatsby

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

out doors.

There was dancing now on the canvas in the

garden, old men pushing young girls backward in eternal grace less circles, superior couples holding each other tortuously, fashionably and keeping in the corners—and a great num ber of single girls dancing individualistically 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 cos tume and champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger bowls. The moon had risen higher, and floating in the Sound was 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 laugh ter. I was enjoying myself now. I

had taken two finger bowls

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 51

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 Third Division during the war?’

‘Why, yes. I was in the Ninth Machine-Gun

Battalion.’ ‘I was in the Seventh Infantry until June nineteen-eigh teen. I knew I’d seen you somewhere before.’

We talked for a moment about some wet, grey little

vil lages 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 Jor dan 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

under stand.

‘I’m Gatsby,’ he said suddenly. ‘What!’ I exclaimed. ‘Oh, I beg your pardon.’

52 The Great Gatsby

‘I thought you knew, old sport. I’m afraid I’m not a

very good host.’

He smiled understandingly—much more than under

standingly. 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 ex ternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on YOU with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. 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 van ished—and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, 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

him self 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.’

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 53

‘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 infor mation that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York. That was compre hensible. But young men didn’t—at least in my provincial inexperience I believed they didn’t—drift coolly out of no where and buy a palace on Long Island Sound.

‘Anyhow he gives large parties,’ said Jordan,

changing the subject with an urbane 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. Vladimir Tostoff’s latest work which attracted so much attention at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the papers you know there was

54 The Great Gatsby

a big sensation.’ He smiled with jovial condescension and added ‘Some sensation!’ whereupon everybody laughed. ‘The piece is known,’ he concluded lustily, ‘as ‘Vladimir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World.’ ‘

The nature of Mr. Tostoff’s composition eluded me,

be cause 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 attractive ly 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 some one would ar rest their falls—but no one swooned backward on Gatsby and no French bob touched Gatsby’s shoulder and no sing ing 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 aston ishment, and followed the butler toward the

house. I noticed that she wore her evening dress, all

her dresses, like sports

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 55

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-win dowed room which overhung the terrace. Eluding Jordan’s undergraduate who was now engaged in an obstetrical con versation 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 every thing 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 lyr ic 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

color, 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 asun-

56 The Great Gatsby

der by dissension. One of the men was talking with curious intensity to a young actress, and his wife after attempt ing 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 so ber 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 strug gle, 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?’

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 57

‘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 How ard…. 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 clus tered 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 hydro plane 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

58 The Great Gatsby

illuminated a bizarre and tumultuous scene. In the ditch be side 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 de tachment 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 tire and from the tire to the observers in a pleas ant, puzzled way.

‘See!’ he explained. ‘It went in the ditch.’ The fact was infinitely astonishing to him—and I rec

ognized 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 de cisively.

‘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.’

‘Well, if you’re a poor driver you oughtn’t to try

driving at night.’

‘But I wasn’t even trying,’ he explained indignantly,

‘I wasn’t even trying.’

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 59

An awed hush fell upon the bystanders. ‘Do you want to commit suicide?’ ‘You’re lucky it was just a wheel! A bad driver and

not even TRYing!’

‘You don’t understand,’ explained the criminal. ‘I

wasn’t driving. There’s another man in the car.’ The shock that followed this declaration found voice in a sustained ‘Ah-h-h!’ as the door of the coupé swung

slowly open. The crowd—it was now a

crowd—stepped back in voluntarily and when the door

had opened wide there was a ghostly pause. Then, very gradually, part by part, a pale dangling individual

stepped out of the wreck, pawing tenta tively at the

ground with a large uncertain dancing shoe.

Blinded by the glare of the headlights and confused

by the incessant groaning of the horns the apparition stood swaying for a moment before he perceived the man in the duster.

‘Wha’s matter?’ he inquired calmly. ‘Did we run

outa gas?’

‘Look!’ Half a dozen fingers pointed at the amputated

wheel—he stared at it for a moment and then looked upward as though he suspected that it had dropped from the sky. ‘It came off,’ some one explained.

He nodded. ‘At first I din’ notice we’d stopped.’ A pause. Then, taking a long breath and

straightening his shoulders he remarked in a determined voice: ‘Wonder’ff tell me where there’s a gas’line station?’

60 The Great Gatsby

At least a dozen men, some of them little better off

than he was, explained to him that wheel and car

were no longer joined by any physical bond.

‘Back out,’ he suggested after a moment. ‘Put her

in re verse.’

‘But the WHEEL’S off!’ He hesitated. ‘No harm in trying,’ he said.

The caterwauling horns had reached a crescendo

and I turned away and cut across the lawn toward

home. I glanced back once. A wafer of a moon was

shining over Gatsby’s house, making the night fine as before and surviving the laughter and the sound of his still glowing garden. A sud den emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the fig ure of the host who stood on the

porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.

Reading over what I have written so far I see I have

given the impression that the events of three nights

several weeks apart were all that absorbed me. On

the contrary they were merely casual events in a

crowded summer and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less than my personal af fairs.

Most of the time I worked. In the early morning the

sun threw my shadow westward as I hurried down the white chasms of lower New York to the Probity Trust.

I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by their first names and lunched with them in dark

crowded restaurants on little pig sausages and

mashed potatoes and coffee. I even

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 61

had a short affair with a girl who lived in Jersey City and worked in the accounting department, but her brother be gan throwing mean looks in my direction so when she went on her vacation in July I let it blow quietly away. I took dinner usually at the Yale Club—for some reason it was the gloomiest event of my day—and then I went up stairs to the library and studied investments and securities for a conscientious hour. There were generally a few rioters around but they never came into the library so it was a good place to work. After that, if the night was mellow I strolled down Madison Avenue past the old Murray Hill Hotel and over Thirty-third Street to the Pennsylvania Station. I began

to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic wom en from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropoli tan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others—poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poi gnant moments of night and life.

Again at eight o’clock, when the dark lanes of the

For ties were five deep with throbbing taxi cabs, bound for the

62 The Great Gatsby

theatre district, I felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted ciga rettes outlined unintelligible gestures inside. Imagining that I, too, was hurrying toward gayety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well.

For a while I lost sight of Jordan Baker, and then in

mid summer I found her again. At first I was flattered to go places with her because she was a golf

champion and ev ery one knew her name. Then it was something more. I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the world con cealed something—most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don’t in the beginning—and one day I found what it was. When we were on a house party together up in Warwick, she left a borrowed car out in the rain with the top down, and then lied about it—and suddenly I remembered the story about her that had eluded me that night at Daisy’s. At her first big golf tournament there was a row that nearly reached the newspapers—a sug gestion that she had moved her ball from a bad lie in the semi-final round. The thing approached the proportions of a scandal—then died away. A caddy retracted his statement and the only other witness admitted that he might have been mistaken. The incident and the name had remained together in my mind.

Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever shrewd

men and now I saw that this was because she felt

safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impos-

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 63

sible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage, and given this unwillingness I sup pose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard jaunty body.

It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a

woman is a thing you never blame deeply—I was

casually sorry, and then I forgot. It was on that same house party that we had a curious conversation about driving a car. It started because she passed so close to some workmen that our fender flicked a button on one man’s coat.

‘You’re a rotten driver,’ I protested. ‘Either you

ought to be more careful or you oughtn’t to drive at all.’ ‘I am careful.’

‘No, you’re not.’ ‘Well, other people are,’ she said lightly. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ ‘They’ll keep out of my way,’ she insisted. ‘It takes

two to make an accident.’

‘Suppose you met somebody just as careless as

yourself.’ ‘I hope I never will,’ she answered. ‘I hate careless people. That’s why I like you.’

Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead,

but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my

desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself

definitely out of that tangle back home. I’d been

writing letters once a week and signing

64 The Great Gatsby

them: ‘Love, Nick,’ and all I could think of was how, when that certain girl played tennis, a faint mustache of perspi ration appeared on her upper lip.

Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that

had to be tactfully broken off be fore I was free.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the

cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 65

Chapter 4

On Sunday morning while church bells rang in the

vil lages along shore the world and its mistress returned to Gatsby’s house and twinkled hilariously on his lawn. ‘He’s a bootlegger,’ said the young ladies, moving some where between his cocktails and his flowers. ‘One time he killed a man who had found out that he was nephew to von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil. Reach me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that there crys tal glass.’

Once I wrote down on the empty spaces of a

time-table the names of those who came to Gatsby’s house that sum mer. It is an old time-table now, disintegrating at its folds and headed ‘This schedule in effect July 5th, 1922.’ But I can still read the grey names and they will give you a bet ter impression than my generalities of those who accepted Gatsby’s hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing nothing whatever about him.

From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers

and the Leeches and a man named Bunsen whom I

knew at Yale and Doctor Webster Civet who was

drowned last summer up in Maine.

And the

Hornbeams and the Willie Voltaires and a whole clan named Blackbuck who always gathered in a cor ner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosoever

came near. And the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert

66 The Great Gatsby

Auerbach and Mr. Chrystie’s wife) and Edgar Beaver, whose hair they say turned cotton-white one winter

afternoon for no good reason at all.

Clarence Endive was from East Egg, as I

remember.

He came only once, in white

knickerbockers, and had a fight with a bum named

Etty in the garden. From farther out on the Island

came the Cheadles and the O. R. P. Schraed ers and the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of Georgia and the Fishguards and the Ripley Snells. Snell was there three days before he went to the penitentiary, so drunk out on the grav el drive that Mrs. Ulysses Swett’s automobile ran over his right hand. The Dancies came too and S. B. Whitebait, who was well over sixty, and Maurice A. Flink and the Hammer heads and Beluga the tobacco importer and Beluga’s girls. From West Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys and Cecil Roebuck and Cecil Schoen and Gulick the state sena tor and Newton Orchid who controlled Films Par Excellence and Eckhaust and Clyde Cohen and Don S. Schwartze (the son) and Arthur McCarty, all connected with the movies in one way or another. And the Catlips and the Bembergs and G. Earl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon who afterward strangled his wife. Da Fontano the promoter came there, and Ed Legros and James B. (“Rot-Gut’) Ferret and the De Jongs and Ernest

Lilly—they came to gamble and when Fer ret wandered into the garden it meant he was cleaned out and Associated Traction would have to fluctuate profitably next day.

A man named Klipspringer was there so often and

so long that he became known as ‘the boarder’—I doubt if

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 67

he had any other home. Of theatrical people there were Gus Waize and Horace O’Donavan and Lester

Meyer and George Duckweed and Francis Bull. Also from New York were the Chromes and the

Backhyssons and the Dennick ers and Russel Betty and the Corrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewars and the Scullys and S. W.

Belcher and the Smirkes and the young Quinns,

divorced now, and Henry L. Palmetto who killed

himself by jumping in front of a sub way train in Times Square.

Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls.

They were never quite the same ones in physical

person but they were so identical one with another

that it inevitably seemed they had been there before. I have forgotten their names—Jaqueline, I think, or

else Consuela or Gloria or Judy or June, and their

last names were either the melodi ous names 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 gor geous car lurched up the rocky drive to

my door and gave

68 The Great Gatsby

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 lift ing work or rigid sitting 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 open

ing 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 color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its mon strous length with triumphant hatboxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns.

Sitting down behind many lay ers 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

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 69

he had become simply the proprietor of an elaborate road house 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 indeci sively on the knee of his caramel-colored 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

flavored conversation in his halls.

‘I’ll tell you God’s truth.’ His right hand suddenly or

dered 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 state ment 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.’

70 The Great Gatsby

‘I see.’ ‘My family all died and I came into a good deal of

mon ey.’

His voice was solemn as if the memory of that sud

den 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 hap pened 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 enchant ed life. I accepted a commission as first lieutenant when it began. In the Argonne Forest I took two machine-gun de tachments 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 Mon tenegro, little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!’

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 71

Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and

nodded at them—with his smile. The smile comprehended Monte negro’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 increduli ty 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 Ja� Gatsby, I read, For

Valour Extraordinary. ‘Here’s another thing I always carry. A souvenir of Ox ford days. It was taken in Trinity Quad—the man on my left is now the Earl of Dorcaster.’

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, young er—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 gnaw ings 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

72 The Great Gatsby

ought to know something about me. I didn’t want you to think I was just some nobody. You see, I usually find my self among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad thing 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 con sented 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

ocean-going 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 motor cycle, and a frantic

policeman rode alongside.

‘All right, old sport,’ called Gatsby. We slowed

down. Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 73

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 favor 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

non-olfactory mon ey. 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 south-eastern Europe, and I was glad

that the sight of Gatsby’s splendid car was included in their somber 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

won der.

Roaring noon. In a well-fanned Forty-second

Street cel-74 The Great Gatsby

lar 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 regard ed 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,

shak ing 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 sid, ‘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 somnambu latory abstraction.

‘Highballs?’ asked the head waiter. ‘This is a nice restaurant here,’ said Mr. Wolfshiem

look ing at the Presbyterian nymphs on the ceiling. ‘But I like across the street better!’

‘Yes, highballs,’ agreed Gatsby, and then to Mr.

Wolf shiem: ‘It’s too hot over there.’

‘Hot and small—yes,’ said Mr. Wolfshiem, ‘but full

of memories.’

‘What place is that?’ I asked.

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 75

‘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 al most 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 you, so help me, move outside this room.’ ‘It was four o’clock in the morning then, and if we’d of raised the blinds we’d of seen daylight.’

‘Did he go?’ I asked innocently. ‘Sure he went,’—Mr. Wolfshiem’s nose flashed at

me in dignantly—‘He turned around in the door and says, ‘Don’t let that waiter take away my coffee!’ Then he went out on the sidewalk and they shot him three times in his full belly and drove away.’

‘Four of them were electrocuted,’ I said,

remembering. ‘Five with Becker.’ His nostrils turned to me in an in terested way. ‘I understand you’re looking for a business gonnegtion.’

The juxtaposition of these two remarks was

startling. Gatsby answered for me:

‘Oh, no,’ he exclaimed, ‘this isn’t the man!’ ‘No?’ Mr. Wolfshiem seemed disappointed. ‘This is just a friend. I told you we’d talk about that

some 76 The Great Gatsby

other time.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Mr. Wolfshiem, ‘I had a

wrong man.’

A succulent hash arrived, and Mr. Wolfshiem, forget

ting the more sentimental atmosphere of the old Metropole, began to eat with ferocious delicacy. His eyes, meanwhile, roved very slowly all around the room—he completed the arc by turning to inspect the people directly behind. I think that, except for my presence, he would have taken one short glance beneath our own table.

‘Look here, old sport,’ said Gatsby, leaning toward

me, ‘I’m afraid I made you a little angry this morning in the car.’

There was the smile again, but this time I held out

against it.

‘I don’t like mysteries,’ I answered. ‘And I don’t

under stand why you won’t come out frankly and tell me what you want. Why has it all got to come through

Miss Baker?’

‘Oh, it’s nothing underhand,’ he assured me. ‘Miss

Bak er’s a great sportswoman, you know, and she’d never do anything that wasn’t all right.’

Suddenly he looked at his watch, jumped up and

hurried from the room leaving me with Mr. Wolfshiem at the table. ‘He has to telephone,’ said Mr. Wolfshiem, following him with his eyes. ‘Fine fellow, isn’t he?

Handsome to look at and a perfect gentleman.’

‘Yes.’ ‘He’s an Oggsford man.’ ‘Oh!’

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 77

‘He went to Oggsford College in England. You

know Oggsford College?’

‘I’ve heard of it.’ ‘It’s one of the most famous colleges in the world.’ ‘Have you known Gatsby for a long time?’ I inquired. ‘Several years,’ he answered in a gratified way. ‘I made

the pleasure of his acquaintance just after the war. But I knew I had discovered a man of fine breeding after I talked with him an hour. I said to myself: ‘There’s the kind of man you’d like to take home and introduce to your mother and sister.’ ‘ He paused. ‘I see you’re

looking at my cuff buttons.’

I hadn’t been looking at them, but I did now. They

were composed of oddly familiar pieces of ivory.

‘Finest specimens of human molars,’ he informed me. ‘Well!’ I inspected them. ‘That’s a very

interesting idea.’ ‘Yeah.’ He flipped his sleeves up under his coat. ‘Yeah,

Gatsby’s very careful about women. He would never so much as look at a friend’s wife.’

When the subject of this instinctive trust returned to

the table and sat down Mr. Wolfshiem drank his

coffee with a jerk and got to his feet.

‘I have enjoyed my lunch,’ he said, ‘and I’m going to run off from you two young men before I outstay my welcome.’ ‘Don’t hurry, Meyer,’ said Gatsby, without enthusiasm. Mr. Wolfshiem raised his hand in a sort

of benediction. ‘You’re very polite but I belong to

another generation,’ he announced solemnly. ‘You sit here and discuss your sports and your young ladies and your——’ He supplied an imagi nary noun with

another wave of his hand—‘As for me, I am

78 The Great Gatsby

fifty years old, and I won’t impose myself on you any lon ger.’

As he shook hands and turned away his tragic

nose was trembling. I wondered if I had said anything to offend him. ‘He becomes very sentimental sometimes,’ explained Gatsby. ‘This is one of his sentimental days. He’s quite a character around New York—a denizen of Broadway.’ ‘Who is he anyhow—an actor?’

‘No.’ ‘A dentist?’ ‘Meyer Wolfshiem? No, he’s a gambler.’ Gatsby

hesitated, then added coolly: ‘He’s the man who fixed

the World’s Se ries back in 1919.’

‘Fixed the World’s Series?’ I repeated.

The idea staggered me. I remembered of course

that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919 but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing that mere ly HAPPENED, the end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people—with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.

‘How did he happen to do that?’ I asked after a minute. ‘He just saw the opportunity.’ ‘Why isn’t he in jail?’ ‘They can’t get him, old sport. He’s a smart man.’ I

insisted on paying the check. As the waiter brought my change I caught sight of Tom Buchanan across the crowded room.

‘Come along with me for a minute,’ I said. ‘I’ve got

to say Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 79

hello to someone.’

When he saw us Tom jumped up and took half a

dozen steps in our direction.

‘Where’ve you been?’ he demanded eagerly.

‘Daisy’s furi ous because you haven’t called up.’

‘This is Mr. Gatsby, Mr. Buchanan.’ They shook hands briefly and a strained, unfamiliar

look of embarrassment came over Gatsby’s face.

‘How’ve you been, anyhow?’ demanded Tom of

me. ‘How’d you happen to come up this far to eat?’ ‘I’ve been having lunch with Mr. Gatsby.’

I turned toward Mr. Gatsby, but he was no longer

there. One October day in nineteen-seventeen—— (said Jordan Baker that afternoon, sitting up very straight on a straight chair in the tea-garden at the Plaza Hotel) —I was walk ing along from one place to another half on the sidewalks and half on the lawns. I was happier on the lawns because I had on shoes from England with rubber nobs on the soles that bit into the soft ground. I had on a new plaid skirt also that blew a little in the wind and whenever this happened the red, white and blue banners in front of all the houses stretched out stiff and said TUT-TUT-TUT-TUT in a disap proving way.

The largest of the banners and the largest of the

lawns belonged to Daisy Fay’s house. She was just

eighteen, two years older than me, and by far the

most popular of all the young girls in Louisville. She dressed in white, and had a little white roadster and all day long the telephone rang in her house and

excited young officers from Camp Tay-

80 The Great Gatsby