III
There was music from my neighbour’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 motorboats
slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of
foam. On weekends 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 New York—every Monday these same oranges and lemons left
his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in
the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in
half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a
butler’s thumb.
At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several
hundred feet of canvas and enough coloured lights to make a Christmas
tree of Gatsby’s enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with
glistening hors-d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of
harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark
gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and
stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that
most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.
By seven o’clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair,
but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and
cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The last swimmers have
come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from
New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and
salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colours, and hair bobbed 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 colour under
the constantly changing light.
Suddenly one of these gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail
out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, 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 Long Island, and somehow they ended up at Gatsby’s door. Once there
they were introduced by somebody who knew Gatsby, and after that they
conducted themselves according to the rules of behaviour associated
with an amusement park. Sometimes they came and went without having
met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that
was its own ticket of admission.
I had been actually invited. A chauffeur in a uniform of robin’s-egg
blue crossed my lawn early that Saturday morning with a surprisingly
formal note from his employer: the honour 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 someone
before I should begin to address cordial remarks to the passersby.
“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 Jordan’s slender golden arm resting in mine, we
descended the steps and sauntered about the garden. A tray of
cocktails floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a
table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced
to us as Mr. Mumble.
“Do you come to these parties often?” inquired Jordan of the girl
beside her.
“The last one was the one I met you at,” answered the girl, in an
alert confident voice. She turned to her companion: “Wasn’t it for
you, Lucille?”
It was for Lucille, too.
“I like to come,” Lucille said. “I never care what I do, so I always
have a good time. When I was here last I tore my gown on a chair, and
he asked me my name and address—inside of a week I got a package from
Croirier’s with a new evening gown in it.”
“Did you keep it?” asked Jordan.
“Sure I did. I was going to wear it tonight, but it was too big in the
bust and had to be altered. It was gas blue with lavender beads. Two
hundred and sixty-five dollars.”
“There’s something funny about a fellow that’ll do a thing like that,”
said the other girl eagerly. “He doesn’t want any trouble with
anybody.”
“Who doesn’t?” I inquired.
“Gatsby. Somebody told me—”
The two girls and Jordan leaned together confidentially.
“Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.”
A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and
listened eagerly.
“I don’t think it’s so much that,” argued Lucille 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
Germany,” he assured us positively.
“Oh, no,” said the first girl, “it couldn’t be that, because he was in
the American army during the war.” As our credulity switched back to
her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. “You look at him sometimes
when he thinks nobody’s 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 had 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 Jordan invited me to join her own party, who were
spread around a table on the other side of the garden. There were
three married couples and Jordan’s escort, a persistent undergraduate
given to violent innuendo, and obviously under the impression that
sooner or later Jordan was going to yield him up her person to a
greater or lesser degree. Instead of rambling, this party had
preserved a dignified homogeneity, and assumed to itself the function
of representing the staid nobility of the countryside—East Egg
condescending to West Egg and carefully on guard against its
spectroscopic gaiety.
“Let’s get out,” whispered Jordan, after a somehow wasteful and
inappropriate half-hour; “this is much too polite for me.”
We got up, and she explained that we were going to find the host: I
had never met him, she said, and it was making me uneasy. The
undergraduate nodded in a cynical, 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 Jordan from head to foot.
“What do you think?” he demanded impetuously.
“About what?”
He waved his hand toward the bookshelves.
“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.”
Jordan looked at him alertly, cheerfully, without answering.
“I was brought by a woman named Roosevelt,” he continued. “Mrs. Claud
Roosevelt. Do you know her? I met her somewhere last night. I’ve been
drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit
in a library.”
“Has it?”
“A little bit, I think. I can’t tell yet. I’ve only been here an hour.
Did I tell you about the books? They’re real. They’re—”
“You told us.”
We shook hands with him gravely and went back 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 individually 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 First
Division during the war?”
“Why yes. I was in the Twenty-eighth Infantry.”
“I was in the Sixteenth until June nineteen-eighteen. I knew I’d seen
you somewhere before.”
We talked for a moment about some wet, grey little villages in France.
Evidently he lived in this vicinity, for he told me that he had just
bought a hydroplane, and was going to try it out in the morning.
“Want to go with me, old sport? Just near the shore along the Sound.”
“What time?”
“Any time that suits you best.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask his name when Jordan looked
around and smiled.
“Having a gay time now?” she inquired.
“Much better.” I turned again to my new acquaintance. “This is an
unusual party for me. I haven’t even seen the host. I live over
there—” I waved my hand at the invisible hedge in the distance, “and
this man Gatsby sent over his chauffeur with an invitation.”
For a moment he looked at me as if he failed to understand.
“I’m Gatsby,” he said suddenly.
“What!” I exclaimed. “Oh, I beg your pardon.”
“I thought you knew, old sport. I’m afraid I’m not a very good host.”
He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one
of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that
you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to
face—the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on
you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you
just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you
would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had
precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to
convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an
elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate
formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he
introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his
words with care.
Almost at the moment when Mr. Gatsby identified himself a butler
hurried toward him with the information that Chicago was calling him
on the wire. He excused himself with a small bow that included each of
us in turn.
“If you want anything just ask for it, old sport,” he urged me.
“Excuse me. I will rejoin you later.”
When he was gone I turned immediately to Jordan—constrained to assure
her of my surprise. I had expected that Mr. Gatsby would be a florid
and corpulent person in his middle years.
“Who is he?” I demanded. “Do you know?”
“He’s just a man named Gatsby.”
“Where is he from, I mean? And what does he do?”
“Now you’re started on the subject,” she answered with a wan smile.
“Well, he told me once he was an Oxford man.”
A dim background started to take shape behind him, but at her next
remark it faded away.
“However, I don’t believe it.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” she insisted, “I just don’t think he went there.”
Something in her tone reminded me of the other girl’s “I think he
killed a man,” and had the effect of stimulating my curiosity. I would
have accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang from
the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York. That
was comprehensible. But young men didn’t—at least in my provincial
inexperience I believed they didn’t—drift coolly out of nowhere and
buy a palace on Long Island Sound.
“Anyhow, he gives large parties,” said Jordan, changing the subject
with an urban distaste for the concrete. “And I like large parties.
They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”
There was the boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the orchestra
leader rang out suddenly above the echolalia of the garden.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he cried. “At the request of Mr. Gatsby we are
going to play for you Mr. Vladmir Tostoff’s latest work, which
attracted so much attention at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the
papers you know there was a big sensation.” He smiled with jovial
condescension, and added: “Some sensation!” Whereupon everybody
laughed.
“The piece is known,” he concluded lustily, “as ‘Vladmir Tostoff’s
Jazz History of the World!’ ”
The nature of Mr. Tostoff’s composition eluded me, because just as it
began my eyes fell on Gatsby, standing alone on the marble steps and
looking from one group to another with approving eyes. His tanned skin
was drawn attractively tight on his face and his short hair looked as
though it were trimmed every day. I could see nothing sinister about
him. I wondered if the fact that he was not drinking helped to set him
off from his guests, for it seemed to me that he grew more correct as
the fraternal hilarity increased. When the “Jazz History of the World”
was over, girls were putting their heads on men’s shoulders in a
puppyish, convivial way, girls were swooning backward playfully into
men’s arms, even into groups, knowing that someone would arrest their
falls—but no one swooned backward on Gatsby, and no French bob touched
Gatsby’s shoulder, and no singing quartets were formed with Gatsby’s
head for one link.
“I beg your pardon.”
Gatsby’s butler was suddenly standing beside us.
“Miss Baker?” he inquired. “I beg your pardon, but Mr. Gatsby would
like to speak to you alone.”
“With me?” she exclaimed in surprise.
“Yes, madame.”
She got up slowly, raising her eyebrows at me in astonishment, and
followed the butler toward the house. I noticed that she wore her
evening-dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes—there was a
jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk
upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings.
I was alone and it was almost two. For some time confused and
intriguing sounds had issued from a long, many-windowed room which
overhung the terrace. Eluding Jordan’s undergraduate, who was now
engaged in an obstetrical conversation with two chorus girls, and who
implored me to join him, I went inside.
The large room was full of people. One of the girls in yellow was
playing the piano, and beside her stood a tall, red-haired young lady
from a famous chorus, engaged in song. She had drunk a quantity of
champagne, and during the course of her song she had decided, ineptly,
that everything was very, very sad—she was not only singing, she was
weeping too. Whenever there was a pause in the song she filled it with
gasping, broken sobs, and then took up the lyric again in a quavering
soprano. The tears coursed down her cheeks—not freely, however, for
when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they
assumed an inky colour, and pursued the rest of their way in slow
black rivulets. A humorous suggestion was made that she sing the notes
on her face, whereupon she threw up her hands, sank into a chair, and
went off into a deep vinous sleep.
“She had a fight with a man who says he’s her husband,” explained a
girl at my elbow.
I looked around. Most of the remaining women were now having fights
with men said to be their husbands. Even Jordan’s party, the quartet
from East Egg, were rent asunder by dissension. One of the men was
talking with curious intensity to a young actress, and his wife, after
attempting to laugh at the situation in a dignified and indifferent
way, broke down entirely and resorted to flank attacks—at intervals
she appeared suddenly at his side like an angry diamond, and hissed:
“You promised!” into his ear.
The reluctance to go home was not confined to wayward men. The hall
was at present occupied by two deplorably sober men and their highly
indignant wives. The wives were sympathizing with each other in
slightly raised voices.
“Whenever he sees I’m having a good time he wants to go home.”
“Never heard anything so selfish in my life.”
“We’re always the first ones to leave.”
“So are we.”
“Well, we’re almost the last tonight,” said one of the men sheepishly.
“The orchestra left half an hour ago.”
In spite of the wives’ agreement that such malevolence was beyond
credibility, the dispute ended in a short struggle, and both wives
were lifted, kicking, into the night.
As I waited for my hat in the hall the door of the library opened and
Jordan Baker and Gatsby came out together. He was saying some last
word to her, but the eagerness in his manner tightened abruptly into
formality as several people approached him to say goodbye.
Jordan’s party were calling impatiently to her from the porch, but she
lingered for a moment to shake hands.
“I’ve just heard the most amazing thing,” she whispered. “How long
were we in there?”
“Why, about an hour.”
“It was … simply amazing,” she repeated abstractedly. “But I swore I
wouldn’t tell it and here I am tantalizing you.” She yawned gracefully
in my face. “Please come and see me … Phone book … Under the name of
Mrs. Sigourney Howard … My aunt …” She was hurrying off as she
talked—her brown hand waved a jaunty salute as she melted into her
party at the door.
Rather ashamed that on my first appearance I had stayed so late, I
joined the last of Gatsby’s guests, who were clustered around him. I
wanted to explain that I’d hunted for him early in the evening and to
apologize for not having known him in the garden.
“Don’t mention it,” he enjoined me eagerly. “Don’t give it another
thought, old sport.” The familiar expression held no more familiarity
than the hand which reassuringly brushed my shoulder. “And don’t
forget we’re going up in the hydroplane tomorrow morning, at nine
o’clock.”
Then the butler, behind his shoulder:
“Philadelphia wants you on the phone, sir.”
“All right, in a minute. Tell them I’ll be right there … Good night.”
“Good night.”
“Good night.” He smiled—and suddenly there seemed to be a pleasant
significance in having been among the last to go, as if he had desired
it all the time. “Good night, old sport … Good night.”
But as I walked down the steps I saw that the evening was not quite
over. Fifty feet from the door a dozen headlights illuminated a
bizarre and tumultuous scene. In the ditch beside the road, right side
up, but violently shorn of one wheel, rested a new coupé which had
left Gatsby’s drive not two minutes before. The sharp jut of a wall
accounted for the detachment of the wheel, which was now getting
considerable attention from half a dozen curious chauffeurs. However,
as they had left their cars blocking the road, a harsh, discordant din
from those in the rear had been audible for some time, and added to
the already violent confusion of the scene.
A man in a long duster had dismounted from the wreck and now stood in
the middle of the road, looking from the car to the tyre and from the
tyre to the observers in a pleasant, puzzled way.
“See!” he explained. “It went in the ditch.”
The fact was infinitely astonishing to him, and I recognized first the
unusual quality of wonder, and then the man—it was the late patron of
Gatsby’s library.
“How’d it happen?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“I know nothing whatever about mechanics,” he said decisively.
“But how did it happen? Did you run into the wall?”
“Don’t ask me,” said Owl Eyes, washing his hands of the whole
matter. “I know very little about driving—next to nothing. It
happened, and that’s all I know.”
“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 coupé 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,” someone 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 a 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 New York
to the Probity Trust. I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen
by their first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded
restaurants on little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee. I
even had a short affair with a girl who lived in Jersey City and
worked in the accounting department, but her brother began throwing
mean looks in my direction, so when she went on her vacation in July I
let it blow quietly away.
I took dinner usually at the Yale Club—for some reason it was the
gloomiest event of my day—and then I went upstairs 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 33rd Street to the Pennsylvania Station.
I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night,
and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and
machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue
and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few
minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever
know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their
apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and
smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm
darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting
loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others—poor young clerks who
loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary
restaurant dinner—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant
moments of night and life.
Again at eight o’clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were lined
five deep with throbbing taxicabs, 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 made unintelligible circles inside. Imagining
that I, too, was hurrying towards gaiety 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 everyone 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 semifinal 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.”
Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had
deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved
her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as
brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself
definitely out of that tangle back home. I’d been writing letters once
a week and signing them: “Love, Nick,” and all I could think of was
how, when that certain girl played tennis, a faint moustache of
perspiration appeared on her upper lip. Nevertheless there was a vague
understanding that had to be tactfully broken off before I was free.
Everyone 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.
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