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 said: ‘All right, Katspaugh,
don’t pay him a penny till he shuts his mouth.’ He shut it then
and there.”
Gatsby took an arm of each of us and moved forward
into the restaurant, whereupon Mr. Wolfshiem swallowed a new sentence
he was starting and lapsed into a somnambulatory abstraction.
“Highballs?” asked the head waiter.
“This is a nice restaurant here,” said Mr. Wolfshiem,
looking at the Presbyterian nymphs on the ceiling. “But I
like across the street better!”
“Yes, highballs,” agreed Gatsby, and then to Mr. Wolfshiem:
“It’s too hot over there.”
“Hot and small—yes,” said Mr. Wolfshiem, “but full of memories.”
“What place is that?” I asked.
“The old Metropole.
“The old Metropole,” brooded Mr. Wolfshiem gloomily.
“Filled with faces dead and gone. Filled with friends gone
now forever. I can’t forget so long as I live the night they shot
Rosy Rosenthal there.
It was six of us at the table, and Rosy had eat and drunk a lot
all evening. When it was almost morning the waiter came up to
him with a funny look and says somebody wants to speak to him
outside. ‘all right,’ says Rosy, and begins to get up,
and I pulled him down in his chair.
“ ‘Let the bastards come in here if they want you, Rosy, but
don’t 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.
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