F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
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 inclined 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 confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep,
preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign
that an intimate revelation was quivering 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 father 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
wanted 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
unaffected 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 Carraways are something
of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of
Buccleuch, but the actual 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 carries on to-day.
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 migration known as the Great War. I
enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of
being the warm centre 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, permanently, 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 suggested 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
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 helplessly.
I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no
longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually
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-giving 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 Maecenas 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.
It was a matter of chance that I should have
rented a house in one of the strangest communities in
I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less
fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the
bizarre 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 imitation of
some Hotel de Ville in
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
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-climax. 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 realize 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
And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I
drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all.
Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white
Georgian Colonial mansion, 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—finally 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
His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to
the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal
contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at
“Now, don’t think my opinion on these
matters is final,” 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 offshore.
“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, making 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 the whip and snap
of the curtains and the groan of a picture 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 apology
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 murmur 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 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
questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear
follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement 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 promise 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
“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
persistent wail all night along the north shore.”
“How gorgeous! Let’s go back, Tom.
To-morrow!” Then she added irrelevantly: “You ought to see the
baby.”
“I’d like to.”
“She’s asleep. She’s three 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.
“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, glancing at Daisy and then back at me,
as if he were alert for something more. “I’d be a God damned fool
to live anywhere 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
“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-breasted girl, with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by throwing
her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her gray sun-strained
eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming,
discontented 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 under 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, sitting 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?”
Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an
awed expression 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,
unobtrusively 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 polite 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 hurried 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. “I’ve gotten to be a
terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored
Empires’ by this man Goddard?”
“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 utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s
been proved.”
“Tom’s getting very profound,”
said Daisy, with an expression 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, glancing 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, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.
“You ought to live in
“This idea is that we’re Nordics. I
am, and you are, and you are, and——” After an infinitesimal
hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again.
“—And we’ve produced all the things that go to make
civilization—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 enthusiastically. “It’s about the butler’s
nose. Do you want to hear about the butler’s nose?”
“That’s why I came over
to-night.”
“Well, he wasn’t always a butler; he
used to be the silver polisher for some people in
“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
affection 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 went into the house.
Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance
consciously devoid of meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and
said “Sh!” in a warning voice. A subdued impassioned 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, honestly surprised. “I thought everybody
knew.”
“I don’t.”
“Why——” she said
hesitantly, “Tom’s got some woman in
“Got some woman?” I repeated blankly.
Miss Baker nodded.
“She might have the decency not to telephone
him at dinner 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 gaiety.
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 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 scepticism, was able
utterly to put this fifth guest’s shrill metallic 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 interested 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
lovely 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.
“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 advanced 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 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 emotion 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 soothing 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.”
“
“Oh—you’re Jordan BAKER.”
I knew now why her face was familiar—its
pleasing contemptuous expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure
pictures of the sporting life at
“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 accidentally 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. Besides, 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
silence.
“Is she from
“From Louisville. Our white girlhood was
passed together there. Our beautiful white——”
“Did you give Nick a little heart to heart
talk on the veranda?” demanded Tom suddenly.
“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 opening 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 disgusted 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 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 wavered 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 movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested
that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine 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 vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.
About half way between West Egg and
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
“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 whitewashed railroad
fence, and we walked back a hundred yards along the road under 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
The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only
car visible 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 blond, spiritless man, anaemic, 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
“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
His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently
around the garage. Then I heard footsteps on a stairs, and in a moment 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, 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
“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 gray, scrawny Italian child
was setting torpedoes in a row along the railroad 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?”
“
So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up
together to
She had changed her dress to a brown figured
muslin, which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to
the platform in
“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 gray old man who bore an absurd
resemblance to John D. Rockefeller. In a basket swung from his neck cowered a
dozen very recent puppies of an indeterminate 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?”
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 concerned 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
“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?”
“Come on,” she urged.
“I’ll telephone my sister Catherine. 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
“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 tapestried furniture entirely too large
for it, so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies
swinging in the gardens of
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 drugstore on the corner. When I came back they had disappeared, 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.
Wilson 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 eye-brows 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 jingled 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. He had just shaved, for there was a white spot of lather on his
cheekbone, and he was most respectful in his greeting to every one in the room.
He informed me that he was in the “artistic game,” and I gathered
later that he was a photographer 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 married.
Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time
before, 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 converted 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 appendicitis
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.”
“I like your dress,” remarked Mrs.
McKee, “I think it’s adorable.”
Mrs. Wilson rejected the compliment by raising her
eyebrow in disdain.
“It’s just a crazy old thing,”
she said. “I just slip it on sometimes 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
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. McKee. “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
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
Tom looked at him blankly.
“Two of them we have framed
down-stairs.”
“Two what?” demanded Tom.
“Two studies. One of them I call MONTAUK
POINT—THE GULLS, and the other I call
The sister Catherine sat down beside me on the
couch.
“Do you live down on
“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 Wilhelm’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
interrupted by Mrs. McKee’s pointing suddenly at Catherine:
“
“I’d like to do more work on
“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 husband, 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
The answer to this was unexpected. It came from
Myrtle, who had overheard the question, and it was violent and obscene.
“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
“Oh, do you like
“Really.”
“Just last year. I went over there with
another girl.” “Stay long?”
“No, we just went to
The late afternoon sky bloomed in the window for a
moment like the blue honey of the
“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:
‘Lucille, that man’s ‘way below you!’ But if I
hadn’t met
“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
breeding, 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 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. ‘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 afternoon.”
“She really ought to get away from
him,” resumed Catherine 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 constant 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 southward toward the park through the soft twilight,
but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident 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, simultaneously enchanted and repelled
by the inexhaustible 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
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 photograph of a man of action.
Taking out my handkerchief I wiped from his cheek the remains of the spot of
dried lather 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 bath-room
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 fluently, and trying to spread a copy of TOWN
TATTLE. over the tapestry scenes of
“Come to lunch some day,” he
suggested, as we groaned down in the elevator.
“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.
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 champagne 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 cataracts 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 station 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
At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came
down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored 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 up-stairs; the cars
from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and
salons 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 introductions
forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew
each other’s names.
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away
from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the
opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute,
spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more
swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already
there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter
and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre of a group, and
then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices
and color under the constantly changing light.
Suddenly one of the gypsies, in trembling opal,
seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her
hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush;
the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst
of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray’s
understudy from the FOLLIES. The party has begun.
I believe that on the first night I went to
Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited.
People were not invited—they went there. They got into automobiles which
bore them out to
I had been actually invited. A chauffeur in a
uniform of robin’s-egg blue crossed my lawn early that Saturday morning
with a surprisingly formal note from his employer: the 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 Gatsby, in a majestic hand.
Dressed up in white flannels I went over to his
lawn a little after seven, and wandered around rather ill at ease among swirls
and eddies of people I didn’t know—though here and there was a face
I had noticed on the commuting train. I was immediately struck by the number of
young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry, and
all talking in low, earnest voices to solid and prosperous Americans. I was
sure that they were selling something: bonds or insurance or automobiles. They
were at least agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced
that it was theirs for a few words in the right key.
As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my
host, but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me
in such an amazed way, and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements,
that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table—the only place in
the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and
alone.
I was on my way to get roaring drunk from sheer
embarrassment when Jordan Baker came out of the house and stood at the head of
the marble steps, leaning a little backward and looking with contemptuous
interest down into the garden.
Welcome or not, I found it necessary to attach
myself to some one before I should begin to address cordial remarks to the
passers-by.
“Hello!” I roared, advancing toward
her. My voice seemed unnaturally loud across the garden.
“I thought you might be here,” she
responded absently as I came up. “I remembered you lived next door
to——” She held my hand impersonally, as a promise that
she’d take care of me in a minute, and gave ear to two girls in twin
yellow dresses, who stopped at the foot of the steps.
“Hello!” they cried together.
“Sorry you didn’t win.”
That was for the golf tournament. She had lost in
the finals the week before.
“You don’t know who we are,”
said one of the girls in yellow, “but we met you here about a month
ago.”
“You’ve dyed your hair since
then,” remarked Jordan, and I started, but the girls had moved casually
on and her remark was addressed to the premature moon, produced like the
supper, no doubt, out of a caterer’s basket. With
“Do you come to these parties often?”
inquired
“The last one was the one I met you
at,” answered the girl, in an alert confident voice. She turned to her
companion: “Wasn’t it for you, Lucille?”
It was for Lucille, too.
“I like to come,” Lucille said.
“I never care what I do, so I always have a good time. When I was here
last I tore my gown on a chair, and he asked me my name and address—inside
of a week I got a package from Croirier’s with a new evening gown in
it.”
“Did you keep it?” asked
“Sure I did. I was going to wear it
to-night, but it was too big in the bust and had to be altered. It was gas blue
with lavender beads. Two hundred and sixty-five dollars.”
“There’s something funny about a
fellow that’ll do a thing like that,” said the other girl eagerly.
“He doesn’t want any trouble with ANYbody.”
“Who doesn’t?” I inquired.
“Gatsby. Somebody told
me——”
The two girls and Jordan leaned together
confidentially.
“Somebody told me they thought he killed a
man once.”
A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr.
Mumbles bent forward and listened eagerly.
“I don’t think it’s so much
THAT,” argued Lucille sceptically; “it’s more that he was a
German spy during the war.”
One of the men nodded in confirmation.
“I heard that from a man who knew all about
him, grew up with him in
“Oh, no,” said the first girl,
“it couldn’t be that, because he was in the American army during
the war.” As our credulity switched back to her she leaned forward with
enthusiasm. “You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody’s
looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man.”
She narrowed her eyes and shivered. Lucille
shivered. We all turned and looked around for Gatsby. It was testimony to the
romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those
who found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.
The first supper—there would be another one
after midnight—was now being served, and
“Let’s get out,” whispered
We got up, and she explained that we were going to
find the host: I had never met him, she said, and it was making me uneasy. The
undergraduate nodded in a cynical, melancholy way.
The bar, where we glanced first, was crowded, but
Gatsby was not there. She couldn’t find him from the top of the steps,
and he wasn’t on the veranda. On a chance we tried an important-looking
door, and walked into a high Gothic library, panelled with carved English oak,
and probably transported complete from some ruin overseas.
A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed
spectacles, was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring
with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he wheeled
excitedly around and examined
“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 ascertain. I ascertained. They’re real.”
“The books?”
He nodded.
“Absolutely real—have pages and everything.
I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact,
they’re absolutely real. Pages and—Here! Lemme show you.”
Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to
the bookcases and returned with Volume One of the “Stoddard
Lectures.”
“See!” he cried triumphantly.
“It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This
fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What
realism! Knew when to stop, too—didn’t cut the pages. But what do
you want? What do you expect?”
He snatched the book from me and replaced it
hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library
was liable to collapse.
“Who brought you?” he demanded.
“Or did you just come? I was brought. Most people were brought.”
“I was brought by a woman named
“Has it?”
“A little bit, I think. I can’t tell
yet. I’ve only been here an hour. Did I tell you about the books?
They’re real. They’re——”
“You told us.” We shook hands with him
gravely and went back outdoors.
There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden;
old men pushing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior
couples holding each other tortuously, fashionably, and keeping in the
corners—and a great number of single girls dancing 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 costume, 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 laughter. I was enjoying myself
now. I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene had changed
before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound.
At a lull in the entertainment the man looked at
me and smiled.
“Your face is familiar,” he said,
politely. “Weren’t you in the Third Division during the war?”
“Why, yes. I was in the Ninth Machine-gun
Battalion.”
“I was in the Seventh Infantry until June
nineteen-eighteen. I knew I’d seen you somewhere before.”
We talked for a moment about some wet, gray little
villages in
“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
“Having a gay time now?” she inquired.
“Much better.” I turned again to my
new acquaintance. “This is an unusual party for me. I haven’t even
seen the host. I live over there——” I waved my hand at the
invisible hedge in the distance, “and this man Gatsby sent over his
chauffeur with an invitation.” For a moment he looked at me as if he
failed to understand.
“I’m Gatsby,” he said suddenly.
“What!” I exclaimed. “Oh, I beg
your pardon.”
“I thought you knew, old sport. I’m
afraid I’m not a very good host.”
He smiled understandingly—much more than
understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal
reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It
faced—or seemed to face—the whole external 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 vanished—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
himself, a butler hurried toward him with the information that
“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
“Who is he?” I demanded.
“Do you know?”
“He’s just a man named Gatsby.”
“Where is he from, I mean? And what does he
do?”
“Now YOU’RE started on the
subject,” she answered with a wan smile. “Well, he told me once he
was an
“However, I don’t believe it.”
“Why not?” “I don’t
know,” she insisted, “I just don’t think he went
there.”
Something in her tone reminded me of the other
girl’s “I think he killed a man,” and had the effect of
stimulating my curiosity. I would have accepted without question the
information that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of
“Anyhow, he gives large parties,” said
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 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, because just as it began my eyes fell on Gatsby, standing alone on
the marble steps and looking from one group to another with approving eyes. His
tanned skin was drawn attractively tight on his face and his short hair looked
as though it were trimmed every day. I could see nothing sinister about him. I
wondered if the fact that he was not drinking helped to set him off from his
guests, for it seemed to me that he grew more correct as the fraternal hilarity
increased. When the JAZZ HISTORY OF THE WORLD was over, girls were putting
their heads on men’s shoulders in a puppyish, convivial way, girls were
swooning backward playfully into men’s arms, even into groups, knowing
that some one would arrest their falls—but no one swooned backward on
Gatsby, and no French bob touched Gatsby’s shoulder, and no singing quartets
were formed with Gatsby’s head for one link.
“I beg your pardon.”
Gatsby’s butler was suddenly standing beside
us.
“Miss Baker?” he inquired. “I
beg your pardon, but Mr. Gatsby would like to speak to you alone.”
“With me?” she exclaimed in surprise.
“Yes, madame.”
She got up slowly, raising her eyebrows at me in
astonishment, and followed the butler toward the house. I noticed that she wore
her evening-dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes—there was a
jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon golf
courses on clean, crisp mornings.
I was alone and it was almost two. For some time
confused and intriguing sounds had issued from a long, many-windowed room which
overhung the terrace. Eluding
The large room was full of people. One of the
girls in yellow was playing the piano, and beside her stood a tall, red-haired
young lady from a famous chorus, engaged in song. She had drunk a quantity of
champagne, and during the course of her song she had decided, ineptly, that
everything was very, very sad—she was not only singing, she was weeping
too. Whenever there was a pause in the song she filled it with gasping, broken
sobs, and then took up the lyric again in a quavering soprano. The tears
coursed down her cheeks—not freely, however, for when they came into
contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky 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
The reluctance to go home was not confined to
wayward men. The hall was at present occupied by two deplorably sober men and
their highly indignant wives. The wives were sympathizing with each other in
slightly raised voices.
“Whenever he sees I’m having a good
time he wants to go home.”
“Never heard anything so selfish in my
life.”
“We’re always the first ones to
leave.”
“So are we.”
“Well, we’re almost the last
to-night,” said one of the men sheepishly. “The orchestra left half
an hour ago.”
In spite of the wives’ agreement that such
malevolence was beyond credibility, the dispute ended in a short struggle, and
both wives were lifted, kicking, into the night.
As I waited for my hat in the hall the door of the
library opened and Jordan Baker and Gatsby came out together. He was saying
some last word to her, but the eagerness in his manner tightened abruptly into
formality as several people approached him to say good-bye.
“I’ve just heard the most amazing
thing,” she whispered. “How long were we in there?”
“Why, about an hour.” “It
was—simply amazing,” she repeated abstractedly. “But I swore
I wouldn’t tell it and here I am tantalizing you.” She yawned
gracefully in my face: “Please come and see me. . . . Phone book . . .
Under the name of Mrs. Sigourney Howard . . . My aunt . . .” She was
hurrying off as she talked—her brown hand waved a jaunty salute as she
melted into her party at the door.
Rather ashamed that on my first appearance I had
stayed so late, I joined the last of Gatsby’s guests, who were clustered
around him. I wanted to explain that I’d hunted for him early in the
evening and to apologize for not having known him in the garden.
“Don’t mention it,” he enjoined
me eagerly. “Don’t give it another thought, old sport.” The
familiar expression held no more familiarity than the hand which reassuringly
brushed my shoulder. “And don’t forget we’re going up in the
hydroplane to-morrow morning, at nine o’clock.”
Then the butler, behind his shoulder: “
“All right, in a minute. Tell them
I’ll be right there. . . . good night.”
“Good night.”
“Good night.” He smiled—and
suddenly there seemed to be a pleasant significance in having been among the
last to go, as if he had desired it all the time. “Good night, old sport.
. . . good night.”
But as I walked down the steps I saw that the
evening was not quite over. Fifty feet from the door a dozen headlights
illuminated a bizarre and tumultuous scene. In the ditch beside the road, right
side up, but violently shorn of one wheel, rested a new coupe which had left
Gatsby’s drive not two minutes before. The sharp jut of a wall accounted
for the detachment of the wheel, which was now getting considerable attention
from half a dozen curious chauffeurs. However, as they had left their cars
blocking the road, a harsh, discordant din from those in the rear had been
audible for some time, and added to the already violent confusion of the scene.
A man in a long duster had dismounted from the
wreck and now stood in the middle of the road, looking from the car to the tire
and from the tire to the observers in a pleasant, puzzled way.
“See!” he explained. “It went in
the ditch.”
The fact was infinitely astonishing to him, and I
recognized first the unusual quality of wonder, and then the man—it was
the late patron of Gatsby’s library.
“How’d it happen?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“I know nothing whatever about
mechanics,” he said decisively.
“But how did it happen? Did you run into the
wall?” “Don’t ask me,” said Owl Eyes, washing his hands
of the whole matter. “I know very little about driving—next to
nothing. It happened, and that’s all I know.”
“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.”
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 coupe swung slowly
open. The crowd—it was now a crowd—stepped back involuntarily, 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
tentatively 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?”
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 reverse.”
“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
sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors,
endowing with complete isolation the figure 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 affairs.
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
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
I began to like
Again at eight o’clock, when the dark lanes
of the Forties were five deep with throbbing taxi-cabs, bound for the 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 cigarettes outlined unintelligible 70 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 midsummer I found her again. At first I was flattered to go places with her,
because she was a golf champion, and every 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 concealed
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 suggestion 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 impossible. She was incurably
dishonest. She wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given
this unwillingness, I suppose 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.”