Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that had to be tactfully broken
off before 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. Chapter 4 On Sunday morning while church bells rang in the
villages alongshore, 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 somewhere 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 crystal glass." Once I wrote down on the empty spaces of a
time-table the names of those who came to Gatsby's house that summer. 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 gray names, and
they will give you a better 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 corner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosoever came
near. And the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert 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. Schraeders, 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 gravel 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 Hammerheads, 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 senator
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
Ferret 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 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 Dennickers 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 subway 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
melodious 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 fiancee, and Ardita Fitz-Peters and Mr. P. Jewett, once head of the
American Legion, and Miss Claudia Hip, with a man reputed to be her
chauffeur, and a prince of something, whom we called Duke, and whose name,
if I ever knew it, I have forgotten. All these people came to Gatsby's house
in the summer. At nine o'clock, one morning late in July, Gatsby's gorgeous
car lurched up the rocky drive to my door and gave out a burst of melody
from its three-noted horn. It was the first time he had called on me, though
I had gone to two of his parties, mounted in his hydroplane, and, at his
urgent invitation, made frequent use of his beach. "Good morning, old sport.
You're having lunch with me to-day and I thought we'd ride up together." He
was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness
of movement that is so peculiarly American--that comes, I suppose, with the
absence of lifting work 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 opening and closing of a hand. He saw me looking with admiration
at his car. "It's pretty, isn't it, old sport?" He jumped off to give me a
better view. "Haven't you ever seen it before?" I'd seen it. Everybody had
seen it. It was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and
there in its monstrous length with triumphant hat-boxes and supper-boxes and
tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a
dozen suns. Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green
leather conservatory, we started to town. I had talked with him perhaps half
a dozen times in the past month and found, to my disappointment, that he had
little to say: So my first impression, that he was a person of some
undefined consequence, had gradually faded and he had become simply the
proprietor of an elaborate 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 indecisively
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 ordered divine
retribution to stand by. "I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle
West--all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford,
because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a
family tradition." He looked at me sideways--and I knew why Jordan Baker had
believed he was lying. He hurried the phrase "educated at Oxford," or
swallowed it, or choked on it, as though it had bothered him before. And
with this doubt, his whole statement fell to pieces, and I wondered if there
wasn't something a little sinister about him, after all. "What part of the
Middle West?" I inquired casually. "San Francisco." "I see." "My family all
died and I came into a good deal of money." His voice was solemn, as if the
memory of that sudden extinction of a clan still haunted him. For a moment I
suspected that he was pulling my leg, but a glance at him convinced me
otherwise. "After that I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of
Europe--Paris, Venice, Rome--collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting big
game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to forget
something very sad that had happened to me long ago." With an effort I
managed to restrain my incredulous laughter. The very phrases were worn so
threadbare that they evoked no image except that of a turbaned "character."
leaking sawdust at every pore as he pursued a tiger through the Bois de
Boulogne. "Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried
very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life. I accepted a
commission as first lieutenant when it began. In the Argonne Forest I took
two machine-gun detachments so far forward that there was a half mile gap on
either side of us where the infantry couldn't advance. We stayed there two
days and two nights, a hundred and thirty men with sixteen Lewis guns, and
when the infantry came up at last they found the insignia of three German
divisions among the piles of dead. I was promoted to be a major, and every
Allied government gave me a decoration--even Montenegro, little Montenegro
down on the Adriatic Sea!" Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and
nodded at them--with his smile. The smile comprehended Montenegro's troubled
history and sympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people.
It appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances which had elicited
this tribute from Montenegro's warm little heart. My incredulity was
submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen
magazines. He reached in his pocket, and a piece of metal, slung on a
ribbon, fell into my palm. "That's the one from Montenegro." To my
astonishment, the thing had an authentic look. "Orderi di Danilo," ran the
circular legend, "Montenegro, Nicolas Rex." "Turn it." "Major Jay Gatsby," I
read, "For Valour Extraordinary." "Here's another thing I always carry. A
souvenir of Oxford days. It was taken in Trinity Quad--the man on my left is
now the Earl of 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, younger--with a cricket bat in
his hand. Then it was all true. I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his
palace on the Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with
their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart. "I'm going
to make a big request of you to-day," he said, pocketing his souvenirs with
satisfaction, "so I thought you ought to know something about me. I didn't
want you to think I was just some nobody. You see, I usually find myself
among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad
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 consented to
speak to you about this matter." I hadn't the faintest idea what "this
matter." was, but I was more annoyed than interested. I hadn't asked Jordan
to tea in order to discuss Mr. Jay Gatsby. I was sure the request would be
something utterly fantastic, and for a moment I was sorry I'd ever set foot
upon his overpopulated lawn. He wouldn't say another word. His correctness
grew on him as we neared the city. We passed Port Roosevelt, where there was
a glimpse of red-belted 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 Long
Island City--only half, for as we twisted among the pillars of the elevated
I heard the familiar "jug--jug--SPAT!" of a motorcycle, and a frantic
policeman rode alongside. "All right, old sport," called Gatsby. We slowed
down. Taking a white card from his wallet, he waved it before the man's
eyes. "Right you are," agreed the policeman, tipping his cap. "Know you next
time, Mr. Gatsby. Excuse ME!" "What was that?" I inquired. "The picture of
Oxford?" "I was able to do the commissioner a 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 money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is
always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all
the mystery and the beauty in the world. A dead man passed us in a hearse
heaped with blooms, followed by two carriages with drawn blinds, and by more
cheerful carriages for friends. The friends looked out at us with the tragic
eyes and short upper lips of southeastern Europe, and I was glad that the
sight of Gatsby's splendid car was included in their sombre holiday. As we
crossed Blackwell's Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white
chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl. I
laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty
rivalry. "Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge," I
thought; "anything at all. . . ." Even Gatsby could happen, without any
particular wonder. Roaring noon. In a well--fanned Forty-second Street
cellar I met Gatsby for lunch. Blinking away the brightness of the street
outside, my eyes picked him out obscurely in the anteroom, talking to
another man. "Mr. Carraway, this is my friend Mr. Wolfshiem." A small,
flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two fine growths
of hair which luxuriated in either nostril. After a moment I discovered his
tiny eyes in the half-darkness. "--So I took one look at him," said Mr.
Wolfshiem, shaking my hand earnestly, "and what do you think I did?" "What?"
I inquired politely. But evidently he was not addressing me, for he dropped
my hand and covered Gatsby with his expressive nose. "I handed the money to
Katspaugh and I 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 somnambulatory abstraction.
"Highballs?" asked the head waiter. "This is a nice restaurant here," said
Mr. Wolfshiem, looking at the Presbyterian nymphs on the ceiling. "But I
like across the street better!" "Yes, highballs," agreed Gatsby, and then to
Mr. Wolfshiem: "It's too hot over there." "Hot and small--yes," said Mr.
Wolfshiem, "but full of memories." "What place is that?" I asked. "The old
Metropole. "The old Metropole," brooded Mr. Wolfshiem gloomily. "Filled with
faces dead and gone. Filled with friends gone now forever. I can't forget so
long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there. It was six of us at
the table, and Rosy had eat and drunk a lot all evening. When it was almost
morning the waiter came up to him with a funny look and says somebody wants
to speak to him outside. 'all right,' says Rosy, and begins to get up, and I
pulled him down in his chair. "'Let the bastards come in here if they want
you, Rosy, but don't 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 indignantly. "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 interested 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 other time." "I beg your pardon," said
Mr. Wolfshiem, "I had a wrong man." A succulent hash arrived, and Mr.
Wolfshiem, forgetting 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 understand 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
Baker'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!" "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
imaginary noun with another wave of his hand. "As for me, I am fifty years
old, and I won't impose myself on you any longer." 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 Series 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 merely
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 hello to some one." When he saw us Tom jumped up and took
half a dozen steps in our direction. "Where've you been?" he demamded
eagerly. "Daisy's furious 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 walking 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
disapproving 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 Taylor
demanded the privilege of monopolizing her that night. "Anyways, for an
hour!" When I came opposite her house that morning her white roadster was
beside the curb, and she was sitting in it with a lieutenant I had never
seen before. They were so engrossed in each other that she didn't see me
until I was five feet away. "Hello, Jordan," she called unexpectedly.
"Please come here." I was flattered that she wanted to speak to me, because
of all the older girls I admired her most. She asked me if I was going to
the Red Cross and make bandages. I was. Well, then, would I tell them that
she couldn't come that day? The officer looked at Daisy while she was
speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and
because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since.
His name was Jay Gatsby, and I didn't lay eyes on him again for over four
years--even after I'd met him on Long Island I didn't realize it was the
same man. That was nineteen-seventeen. By the next year I had a few beaux
myself, and I began to play in tournaments, so I didn't see Daisy very
often. She went with a slightly older crowd--when she went with anyone at
all. Wild rumors were circulating about her--how her mother had found her
packing her bag one winter night to go to New York and say good-by to a
soldier who was going overseas. She was effectually prevented, but she
wasn't on speaking terms with her family for several weeks. After that she
didn't play around with the soldiers any more, but only with a few
flat-footed, short-sighted young men in town, who couldn't get into the army
at all. By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever. She had a debut
after the Armistice, and in February she was presumably engaged to a man
from New Orleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago, with more
pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before. He came down with a
hundred people in four private cars, and hired a whole floor of the Seelbach
Hotel, and the day before the wedding he gave her a string of pearls valued
at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I was bridesmaid. I came into
her room half an hour before the bridal dinner, and found her lying on her
bed as lovely as the June night in her flowered dress--and as drunk as a
monkey. she had a bottle of Sauterne in one hand and a letter in the other.
"'Gratulate me," she muttered. "Never had a drink before, but oh how I do
enjoy it." "What's the matter, Daisy?" I was scared, I can tell you; I'd
never seen a girl like that before. "Here, deares'." She groped around in a
waste-basket she had with her on the bed and pulled out the string of
pearls. "Take 'em down-stairs and give 'em back to whoever they belong to.
Tell 'em all Daisy's change' her mine. Say: 'Daisy's change' her mine!'."
She began to cry--she cried and cried. I rushed out and found her mother's
maid, and we locked the door and got her into a cold bath. She wouldn't let
go of the letter. She took it into the tub with her and squeezed it up into
a wet ball, and only let me leave it in the soap-dish when she saw that it
was coming to pieces like snow. But she didn't say another word. We gave her
spirits of ammonia and put ice on her forehead and hooked her back into her
dress, and half an hour later, when we walked out of the room, the pearls
were around her neck and the incident was over. Next day at five o'clock she
married Tom Buchanan without so much as a shiver, and started off on a three
months' trip to the South Seas. I saw them in Santa Barbara when they came
back, and I thought I'd never seen a girl so mad about her husband. If he
left the room for a minute she'd look around uneasily, and say: "Where's Tom
gone?" and wear the most abstracted expression until she saw him coming in
the door. She used to sit on the sand with his head in her lap by the hour,
rubbing her fingers over his eyes and looking at him with unfathomable
delight. It was touching to see them together--it made you laugh in a
hushed, fascinated way. That was in August. A week after I left Santa
Barbara Tom ran into a wagon on the Ventura road one night, and ripped a
front wheel off his car. The girl who was with him got into the papers, too,
because her arm was broken--she was one of the chambermaids in the Santa
Barbara Hotel. The next April Daisy had her little girl, and they went to
France for a year. I saw them one spring in Cannes, and later in Deauville,
and then they came back to Chicago to settle down. Daisy was popular in
Chicago, as you know. They moved with a fast crowd, all of them young and
rich and wild, but she came out with an absolutely perfect reputation.
Perhaps because she doesn't drink. It's a great advantage not to drink among
hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time
any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that
they don't see or care. Perhaps Daisy never went in for amour at all--and
yet there's something in that voice of hers. . . . Well, about six weeks
ago, she heard the name Gatsby for the first time in years. It was when I
asked you--do you remember?--if you knew Gatsby in West Egg. After you had
gone home she came into my room and woke me up, and said: "What Gatsby?" and
when I described him--I was half asleep--she said in the strangest voice
that it must be the man she used to know. It wasn't until then that I
connected this Gatsby with the officer in her white car. When Jordan Baker
had finished telling all this we had left the Plaza for half an hour and
were driving in a victoria through Central Park. The sun had gone down
behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in the West Fifties, and the
clear voices of girls, already gathered like crickets on the grass, rose
through the hot twilight: "I'm the Sheik of Araby. Your love belongs to me.
At night when you're are asleep Into your tent I'll creep----" "It was a
strange coincidence," I said. "But it wasn't a coincidence at all." "Why
not?" "Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay."
Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June
night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his
purposeless splendor. "He wants to know," continued Jordan, "if you'll
invite Daisy to your house some afternoon and then let him come over." The
modesty of the demand shook me. He had waited five years and bought a
mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths--so that he could "come
over." some afternoon to a stranger's garden. "Did I have to know all this
before he could ask such a little thing?" "He's afraid, he's waited so long.
He thought you might be offended. You see, he's a regular tough underneath
it all." Something worried me. "Why didn't he ask you to arrange a meeting?"
"He wants her to see his house," she explained. "And your house is right
next door." "Oh!" "I think he half expected her to wander into one of his
parties, some night," went on Jordan, "but she never did. Then he began
asking people casually if they knew her, and I was the first one he found.
It was that night he sent for me at his dance, and you should have heard the
elaborate way he worked up to it. Of course, I immediately suggested a
luncheon in New York--and I thought he'd go mad: "'I don't want to do
anything out of the way!' he kept saying. 'I want to see her right next
door.' "When I said you were a particular friend of Tom's, he started to
abandon the whole idea. He doesn't know very much about Tom, though he says
he's read a Chicago paper for years just on the chance of catching a glimpse
of Daisy's name." It was dark now, and as we dipped under a little bridge I
put my arm around Jordan's golden shoulder and drew her toward me and asked
her to dinner. Suddenly I wasn't thinking of Daisy and Gatsby any more, but
of this clean, hard, limited person, who dealt in universal scepticism, and
who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. A phrase began to
beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: "There are only the
pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired." "And Daisy ought to have
something in her life," murmured Jordan to me. "Does she want to see
Gatsby?" "She's not to know about it. Gatsby doesn't want her to know.
You're just supposed to invite her to tea." We passed a barrier of dark
trees, and then the facade of Fifty-ninth Street, a block of delicate pale
light, beamed down into the park. Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, I had no
girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding
signs, and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan,
scornful mouth smiled, and so I drew her up again closer, this time to my
face. Chapter 5 When I came home to West Egg that night I was afraid for a
moment that my house was on fire. Two o'clock and the whole corner of the
peninsula was blazing with light, which fell unreal on the shrubbery and
made thin elongating glints upon the roadside wires. Turning a corner, I saw
that it was Gatsby's house, lit from tower to cellar. At first I thought it
was another party, a wild rout that had resolved itself into
"hide-and-go-seek." or "sardines-in-the-box." with all the house thrown open
to the game. But there wasn't a sound. Only wind in the trees, which blew
the wires and made the lights go off and on again as if the house had winked
into the darkness. As my taxi groaned away I saw Gatsby walking toward me
across his lawn. "Your place looks like the World's Fair," I said. "Does
it?" He turned his eyes toward it absently. "I have been glancing into some
of the rooms. Let's go to Coney Island, old sport. In my car." "It's too
late." "Well, suppose we take a plunge in the swimming-pool? I haven't made
use of it all summer." "I've got to go to bed." "All right." He waited,
looking at me with suppressed eagerness. "I talked with Miss Baker," I said
after a moment. "I'm going to call up Daisy to-morrow and invite her over
here to tea." "Oh, that's all right," he said carelessly. "I don't want to
put you to any trouble." "What day would suit you?" "What day would suit
YOU?" he corrected me quickly. "I don't want to put you to any trouble, you
see." "How about the day after to-morrow?" He considered for a moment. Then,
with reluctance: "I want to get the grass cut," he said. We both looked at
the grass--there was a sharp line where my ragged lawn ended and the darker,
well-kept expanse of his began. I suspected that he meant my grass. "There's
another little thing," he said uncertainly, and hesitated. "Would you rather
put it off for a few days?" I asked. "Oh, it isn't about that. At least----"
He fumbled with a series of beginnings. "Why, I thought--why, look here, old
sport, you don't make much money, do you?" "Not very much." This seemed to
reassure him and he continued more confidently. "I thought you didn't, if
you'll pardon my--You see, I carry on a little business on the side, a sort
of side line, you understand. And I thought that if you don't make very
much--You're selling bonds, aren't you, old sport?" "Trying to." "Well, this
would interest you. It wouldn't take up much of your time and you might pick
up a nice bit of money. It happens to be a rather confidential sort of
thing." I realize now that under different circumstances that conversation
might have been one of the crises of my life. But, because the offer was
obviously and tactlessly for a service to be rendered, I had no choice
except to cut him off there. "I've got my hands full," I said. "I'm much
obliged but I couldn't take on any more work." "You wouldn't have to do any
business with Wolfshiem." Evidently he thought that I was shying away from
the "gonnegtion." mentioned at lunch, but I assured him he was wrong. He
waited a moment longer, hoping I'd begin a conversation, but I was too
absorbed to be responsive, so he went unwillingly home. The evening had made
me light-headed and happy; I think I walked into a deep sleep as I entered
my front door. So I didn't know whether or not Gatsby went to Coney Island,
or for how many hours he "glanced into rooms." while his house blazed
gaudily on. I called up Daisy from the office next morning, and invited her
to come to tea. "Don't bring Tom," I warned her. "What?" "Don't bring Tom."
"Who is 'Tom'?" she asked innocently. The day agreed upon was pouring rain.
At eleven o'clock a man in a raincoat, dragging a lawn-mower, tapped at my
front door and said that Mr. Gatsby had sent him over to cut my grass. This
reminded me that I had forgotten to tell my Finn to come back, so I drove
into West Egg Village to search for her among soggy, whitewashed alleys and
to buy some cups and lemons and flowers. The flowers were unnecessary, for
at two o'clock a greenhouse arrived from Gatsby's, with innumerable
receptacles to contain it. An hour later the front door opened nervously,
and Gatsby, in a white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-colored tie,
hurried in. He was pale, and there were dark signs of sleeplessness beneath
his eyes. "Is everything all right?" he asked immediately. "The grass looks
fine, if that's what you mean." "What grass?" he inquired blankly. "Oh, the
grass in the yard." He looked out the window at it, but, judging from his
expression, I don't believe he saw a thing. "Looks very good," he remarked
vaguely. "One of the papers said they thought the rain would stop about
four. I think it was the JOURNAL. Have you got everything you need in the
shape of--of tea?" I took him into the pantry, where he looked a little
reproachfully at the Finn. Together we scrutinized the twelve lemon cakes
from the delicatessen shop. "Will they do?" I asked. "Of course, of course!
They're fine!" and he added hollowly, ". . .old sport." The rain cooled
about half-past three to a damp mist, through which occasional thin drops
swam like dew. Gatsby looked with vacant eyes through a copy of Clay's
ECONOMICS, starting at the Finnish tread that shook the kitchen floor, and
peering toward the bleared windows from time to time as if a series of
invisible but alarming happenings were taking place outside. Finally he got
up and informed me, in an uncertain voice, that he was going home. "Why's
that?" "Nobody's coming to tea. It's too late!" He looked at his watch as if
there was some pressing demand on his time elsewhere. "I can't wait all
day." "Don't be silly; it's just two minutes to four." He sat down
miserably, as if I had pushed him, and simultaneously there was the sound of
a motor turning into my lane. We both jumped up, and, a little harrowed
myself, I went out into the yard. Under the dripping bare lilac-trees a
large open car was coming up the drive. It stopped. Daisy's face, tipped
sideways beneath a three-cornered lavender hat, looked out at me with a
bright ecstatic smile. "Is this absolutely where you live, my dearest one?"
The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I had to
follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone, before
any words came through. A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of blue paint
across her cheek, and her hand was wet with glistening drops as I took it to
help her from the car. "Are you in love with me," she said low in my ear,
"or why did I have to come alone?" "That's the secret of Castle Rackrent.
Tell your chauffeur to go far away and spend an hour." "Come back in an
hour, Ferdie." Then in a grave murmur: "His name is Ferdie." "Does the
gasoline affect his nose?" "I don't think so," she said innocently. "Why?"
We went in. To my overwhelming surprise the living-room was deserted. "Well,
that's funny," I exclaimed. "What's funny?" She turned her head as there was
a light dignified knocking at the front door. I went out and opened it.
Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat
pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes.
With his hands still in his coat pockets he stalked by me into the hall,
turned sharply as if he were on a wire, and disappeared into the
living-room. It wasn't a bit funny. Aware of the loud beating of my own
heart I pulled the door to against the increasing rain. For half a minute
there wasn't a sound. Then from the living-room I heard a sort of choking
murmur and part of a laugh, followed by Daisy's voice on a clear artificial
note: "I certainly am awfully glad to see you again." A pause; it endured
horribly. I had nothing to do in the hall, so I went into the room. Gatsby,
his hands still in his pockets, was reclining against the mantelpiece in a
strained counterfeit of perfect ease, even of boredom. His head leaned back
so far that it rested against the face of a defunct mantelpiece clock, and
from this position his distraught eyes stared down at Daisy, who was
sitting, frightened but graceful, on the edge of a stiff chair. "We've met
before," muttered Gatsby. His eyes glanced momentarily at me, and his lips
parted with an abortive attempt at a laugh. Luckily the clock took this
moment to tilt dangerously at the pressure of his head, whereupon he turned
and caught it with trembling fingers, and set it back in place. Then he sat
down, rigidly, his elbow on the arm of the sofa and his chin in his hand.
"I'm sorry about the clock," he said. My own face had now assumed a deep
tropical burn. I couldn't muster up a single commonplace out of the thousand
in my head. "It's an old clock," I told them idiotically. I think we all
believed for a moment that it had smashed in pieces on the floor. "We
haven't met for many years," said Daisy, her voice as matter-of-fact as it
could ever be. "Five years next November." The automatic quality of Gatsby's
answer set us all back at least another minute. I had them both on their
feet with the desperate suggestion that they help me make tea in the kitchen
when the demoniac Finn brought it in on a tray. Amid the welcome confusion
of cups and cakes a certain physical decency established itself. Gatsby got
himself into a shadow and, while Daisy and I talked, looked conscientiously
from one to the other of us with tense, unhappy eyes. However, as calmness
wasn't an end in itself, I made an excuse at the first possible moment, and
got to my feet. "Where are you going?" demanded Gatsby in immediate alarm.
"I'll be back." "I've got to speak to you about something before you go." He
followed me wildly into the kitchen, closed the door, and whispered: "Oh,
God!" in a miserable way. "What's the matter?" "This is a terrible mistake,"
he said, shaking his head from side to side, "a terrible, terrible mistake."
"You're just embarrassed, that's all," and luckily I added: "Daisy's
embarrassed too." "She's embarrassed?" he repeated incredulously. "Just as
much as you are." "Don't talk so loud." "You're acting like a little boy," I
broke out impatiently. "Not only that, but you're rude. Daisy's sitting in
there all alone." He raised his hand to stop my words, looked at me with
unforgettable reproach, and, opening the door cautiously, went back into the
other room. I walked out the back way--just as Gatsby had when he had made
his nervous circuit of the house half an hour before--and ran for a huge
black knotted tree, whose massed leaves made a fabric against the rain. Once
more it was pouring, and my irregular lawn, well-shaved by Gatsby's
gardener, abounded in small, muddy swamps and prehistoric marshes. There was
nothing to look at from under the tree except Gatsby's enormous house, so I
stared at it, like Kant at his church steeple, for half an hour. A brewer
had built it early in the "period." craze, a decade before, and there was a
story that he'd agreed to pay five years' taxes on all the neighboring
cottages if the owners would have their roofs thatched with straw. Perhaps
their refusal took the heart out of his plan to Found a Family--he went into
an immediate decline. His children sold his house with the black wreath
still on the door. Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have
always been obstinate about being peasantry. After half an hour, the sun
shone again, and the grocer's automobile rounded Gatsby's drive with the raw
material for his servants' dinner--I felt sure he wouldn't eat a spoonful. A
maid began opening the upper windows of his house, appeared momentarily in
each, and, leaning from a large central bay, spat meditatively into the
garden. It was time I went back. While the rain continued it had seemed like
the murmur of their voices, rising and swelling a little now and then with
gusts of emotion. But in the new silence I felt that silence had fallen
within the house too. I went in--after making every possible noise in the
kitchen, short of pushing over the stove--but I don't believe they heard a
sound. They were sitting at either end of the couch, looking at each other
as if some question had been asked, or was in the air, and every vestige of
embarrassment was gone. Daisy's face was smeared with tears, and when I came
in she jumped up and began wiping at it with her handkerchief before a
mirror. But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He
literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being
radiated from him and filled the little room. "Oh, hello, old sport," he
said, as if he hadn't seen me for years. I thought for a moment he was going
to shake hands. "It's stopped raining." "Has it?" When he realized what I
was talking about, that there were twinkle-bells of sunshine in the room, he
smiled like a weather man, like an ecstatic patron of recurrent light, and
repeated the news to Daisy. "What do you think of that? It's stopped
raining." "I'm glad, Jay." Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told
only of her unexpected joy. "I want you and Daisy to come over to my house,"
he said, "I'd like to show her around." "You're sure you want me to come?"
"Absolutely, old sport." Daisy went up-stairs to wash her face--too late I
thought with humiliation of my towels--while Gatsby and I waited on the
lawn. "My house looks well, doesn't it?" he demanded. "See how the whole
front of it catches the light." I agreed that it was splendid. "Yes." His
eyes went over it, every arched door and square tower. "It took me just
three years to earn the money that bought it." "I thought you inherited your
money." "I did, old sport," he said automatically, "but I lost most of it in
the big panic--the panic of the war." I think he hardly knew what he was
saying, for when I asked him what business he was in he answered, "That's my
affair," before he realized that it wasn't the appropriate reply. "Oh, I've