There was music from my neighbour\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York\u2014every 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\u2019s thumb.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d\u2019oeuvre, 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.<\/p>\n
By seven o\u2019clock 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\u2019s names.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s understudy from the Follies. The party has begun.<\/p>\n
I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby\u2019s house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited\u2014they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island, and somehow they ended up at Gatsby\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
I had been actually invited. A chauffeur in a uniform of robin\u2019s-egg blue crossed my lawn early that Saturday morning with a surprisingly formal note from his employer: the honour would be entirely Gatsby\u2019s, it said, if I would attend his \u201clittle party\u201d 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\u2014signed Jay Gatsby, in a majestic hand.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t know\u2014though 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2014the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Welcome or not, I found it necessary to attach myself to someone before I should begin to address cordial remarks to the passersby.<\/p>\n
\u201cHello!\u201d I roared, advancing toward her. My voice seemed unnaturally loud across the garden.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought you might be here,\u201d she responded absently as I came up. \u201cI remembered you lived next door to\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n
She held my hand impersonally, as a promise that she\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cHello!\u201d they cried together. \u201cSorry you didn\u2019t win.\u201d<\/p>\n
That was for the golf tournament. She had lost in the finals the week before.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t know who we are,\u201d said one of the girls in yellow, \u201cbut we met you here about a month ago.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ve dyed your hair since then,\u201d 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\u2019s basket. With Jordan\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you come to these parties often?\u201d inquired Jordan of the girl beside her.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe last one was the one I met you at,\u201d answered the girl, in an alert confident voice. She turned to her companion: \u201cWasn\u2019t it for you, Lucille?\u201d<\/p>\n
It was for Lucille, too.<\/p>\n
\u201cI like to come,\u201d Lucille said. \u201cI 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\u2014inside of a week I got a package from Croirier\u2019s with a new evening gown in it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDid you keep it?\u201d asked Jordan.<\/p>\n
\u201cSure 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s something funny about a fellow that\u2019ll do a thing like that,\u201d said the other girl eagerly. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t want any trouble with any<\/i>body.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWho doesn\u2019t?\u201d I inquired.<\/p>\n
\u201cGatsby. Somebody told me\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n
The two girls and Jordan leaned together confidentially.<\/p>\n
\u201cSomebody told me they thought he killed a man once.\u201d<\/p>\n
A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and listened eagerly.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s so much that<\/i>,\u201d argued Lucille sceptically; \u201cIt\u2019s more that he was a German spy during the war.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of the men nodded in confirmation.<\/p>\n
\u201cI heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in Germany,\u201d he assured us positively.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, no,\u201d said the first girl, \u201cit couldn\u2019t be that, because he was in the American army during the war.\u201d As our credulity switched back to her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. \u201cYou look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody\u2019s looking at him. I\u2019ll bet he killed a man.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The first supper\u2014there would be another one after midnight\u2014was 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\u2019s 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\u2014East Egg condescending to West Egg and carefully on guard against its spectroscopic gaiety.<\/p>\n
\u201cLet\u2019s get out,\u201d whispered Jordan, after a somehow wasteful and inappropriate half-hour; \u201cthis is much too polite for me.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The bar, where we glanced first, was crowded, but Gatsby was not there. She couldn\u2019t find him from the top of the steps, and he wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat do you think?\u201d he demanded impetuously.<\/p>\n
\u201cAbout what?\u201d<\/p>\n
He waved his hand toward the bookshelves.<\/p>\n
\u201cAbout that. As a matter of fact you needn\u2019t bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They\u2019re real.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe books?\u201d<\/p>\n
He nodded.<\/p>\n
\u201cAbsolutely real\u2014have pages and everything. I thought they\u2019d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they\u2019re absolutely real. Pages and\u2014Here! Lemme show you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned with Volume One of the Stoddard Lectures<\/i>.<\/p>\n
\u201cSee!\u201d he cried triumphantly. \u201cIt\u2019s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella\u2019s a regular Belasco. It\u2019s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too\u2014didn\u2019t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWho brought you?\u201d he demanded. \u201cOr did you just come? I was brought. Most people were brought.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jordan looked at him alertly, cheerfully, without answering.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was brought by a woman named Roosevelt,\u201d he continued. \u201cMrs. Claud Roosevelt. Do you know her? I met her somewhere last night. I\u2019ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHas it?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cA little bit, I think. I can\u2019t tell yet. I\u2019ve only been here an hour. Did I tell you about the books? They\u2019re real. They\u2019re\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou told us.\u201d<\/p>\n
We shook hands with him gravely and went back outdoors.<\/p>\n
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\u2014and 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 \u201cstunts\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
At a lull in the entertainment the man looked at me and smiled.<\/p>\n
\u201cYour face is familiar,\u201d he said politely. \u201cWeren\u2019t you in the First Division during the war?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy yes. I was in the Twenty-eighth Infantry.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI was in the Sixteenth until June nineteen-eighteen. I knew I\u2019d seen you somewhere before.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWant to go with me, old sport? Just near the shore along the Sound.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat time?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAny time that suits you best.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask his name when Jordan looked around and smiled.<\/p>\n
\u201cHaving a gay time now?\u201d she inquired.<\/p>\n
\u201cMuch better.\u201d I turned again to my new acquaintance. \u201cThis is an unusual party for me. I haven\u2019t even seen the host. I live over there\u2014\u201d I waved my hand at the invisible hedge in the distance, \u201cand this man Gatsby sent over his chauffeur with an invitation.\u201d<\/p>\n
For a moment he looked at me as if he failed to understand.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m Gatsby,\u201d he said suddenly.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat!\u201d I exclaimed. \u201cOh, I beg your pardon.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought you knew, old sport. I\u2019m afraid I\u2019m not a very good host.\u201d<\/p>\n
He smiled understandingly\u2014much 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\u2014or seemed to face\u2014the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you<\/i> 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\u2014and 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\u2019d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you want anything just ask for it, old sport,\u201d he urged me. \u201cExcuse me. I will rejoin you later.\u201d<\/p>\n
When he was gone I turned immediately to Jordan\u2014constrained to assure her of my surprise. I had expected that Mr. Gatsby would be a florid and corpulent person in his middle years.<\/p>\n
\u201cWho is he?\u201d I demanded. \u201cDo you know?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s just a man named Gatsby.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere is he from, I mean? And what does he do?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNow you<\/i>\u2019re started on the subject,\u201d she answered with a wan smile. \u201cWell, he told me once he was an Oxford man.\u201d<\/p>\n
A dim background started to take shape behind him, but at her next remark it faded away.<\/p>\n
\u201cHowever, I don\u2019t believe it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy not?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d she insisted, \u201cI just don\u2019t think he went there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Something in her tone reminded me of the other girl\u2019s \u201cI think he killed a man,\u201d 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\u2019t\u2014at least in my provincial inexperience I believed they didn\u2019t\u2014drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island Sound.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnyhow, he gives large parties,\u201d said Jordan, changing the subject with an urban distaste for the concrete. \u201cAnd I like large parties. They\u2019re so intimate. At small parties there isn\u2019t any privacy.\u201d<\/p>\n
There was the boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the orchestra leader rang out suddenly above the echolalia of the garden.<\/p>\n
\u201cLadies and gentlemen,\u201d he cried. \u201cAt the request of Mr. Gatsby we are going to play for you Mr. Vladmir Tostoff\u2019s latest work, which attracted so much attention at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the papers you know there was a big sensation.\u201d He smiled with jovial condescension, and added: \u201cSome sensation!\u201d Whereupon everybody laughed.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe piece is known,\u201d he concluded lustily, \u201cas \u2018Vladmir Tostoff\u2019s Jazz History of the World!\u2019\u200a\u201d<\/p>\n
The nature of Mr. Tostoff\u2019s 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 \u201cJazz History of the World\u201d was over, girls were putting their heads on men\u2019s shoulders in a puppyish, convivial way, girls were swooning backward playfully into men\u2019s arms, even into groups, knowing that someone would arrest their falls\u2014but no one swooned backward on Gatsby, and no French bob touched Gatsby\u2019s shoulder, and no singing quartets were formed with Gatsby\u2019s head for one link.<\/p>\n
\u201cI beg your pardon.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gatsby\u2019s butler was suddenly standing beside us.<\/p>\n
\u201cMiss Baker?\u201d he inquired. \u201cI beg your pardon, but Mr. Gatsby would like to speak to you alone.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWith me?\u201d she exclaimed in surprise.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, madame.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2014there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s undergraduate, who was now engaged in an obstetrical conversation with two chorus girls, and who implored me to join him, I went inside.<\/p>\n
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\u2014she 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\u2014not 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe had a fight with a man who says he\u2019s her husband,\u201d explained a girl at my elbow.<\/p>\n
I looked around. Most of the remaining women were now having fights with men said to be their husbands. Even Jordan\u2019s 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\u2014at intervals she appeared suddenly at his side like an angry diamond, and hissed: \u201cYou promised!\u201d into his ear.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhenever he sees I\u2019m having a good time he wants to go home.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNever heard anything so selfish in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re always the first ones to leave.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo are we.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, we\u2019re almost the last tonight,\u201d said one of the men sheepishly. \u201cThe orchestra left half an hour ago.\u201d<\/p>\n
In spite of the wives\u2019 agreement that such malevolence was beyond credibility, the dispute ended in a short struggle, and both wives were lifted, kicking, into the night.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Jordan\u2019s party were calling impatiently to her from the porch, but she lingered for a moment to shake hands.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve just heard the most amazing thing,\u201d she whispered. \u201cHow long were we in there?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy, about an hour.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was\u2026 simply amazing,\u201d she repeated abstractedly. \u201cBut I swore I wouldn\u2019t tell it and here I am tantalizing you.\u201d She yawned gracefully in my face. \u201cPlease come and see me\u2026 Phone book\u2026 Under the name of Mrs. Sigourney Howard\u2026 My aunt\u2026\u201d She was hurrying off as she talked\u2014her brown hand waved a jaunty salute as she melted into her party at the door.<\/p>\n
Rather ashamed that on my first appearance I had stayed so late, I joined the last of Gatsby\u2019s guests, who were clustered around him. I wanted to explain that I\u2019d hunted for him early in the evening and to apologize for not having known him in the garden.<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t mention it,\u201d he enjoined me eagerly. \u201cDon\u2019t give it another thought, old sport.\u201d The familiar expression held no more familiarity than the hand which reassuringly brushed my shoulder. \u201cAnd don\u2019t forget we\u2019re going up in the hydroplane tomorrow morning, at nine o\u2019clock.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then the butler, behind his shoulder:<\/p>\n
\u201cPhiladelphia wants you on the phone, sir.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAll right, in a minute. Tell them I\u2019ll be right there\u2026 Good night.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cGood night.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cGood night.\u201d He smiled\u2014and 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. \u201cGood night, old sport\u2026 Good night.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 coup\u00e9 which had left Gatsby\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cSee!\u201d he explained. \u201cIt went in the ditch.\u201d<\/p>\n
The fact was infinitely astonishing to him, and I recognized first the unusual quality of wonder, and then the man\u2014it was the late patron of Gatsby\u2019s library.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow\u2019d it happen?\u201d<\/p>\n
He shrugged his shoulders.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know nothing whatever about mechanics,\u201d he said decisively.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut how did it happen? Did you run into the wall?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t ask me,\u201d said Owl Eyes, washing his hands of the whole matter. \u201cI know very little about driving\u2014next to nothing. It happened, and that\u2019s all I know.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, if you\u2019re a poor driver you oughtn\u2019t to try driving at night.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I wasn\u2019t even trying,\u201d he explained indignantly, \u201cI wasn\u2019t even trying.\u201d<\/p>\n
An awed hush fell upon the bystanders.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you want to commit suicide?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re lucky it was just a wheel! A bad driver and not even try<\/i>ing!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t understand,\u201d explained the criminal. \u201cI wasn\u2019t driving. There\u2019s another man in the car.\u201d<\/p>\n
The shock that followed this declaration found voice in a sustained \u201cAh-h-h!\u201d as the door of the coup\u00e9 swung slowly open. The crowd\u2014it was now a crowd\u2014stepped 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWha\u2019s matter?\u201d he inquired calmly. \u201cDid we run outa gas?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cLook!\u201d<\/p>\n
Half a dozen fingers pointed at the amputated wheel\u2014he stared at it for a moment, and then looked upward as though he suspected that it had dropped from the sky.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt came off,\u201d someone explained.<\/p>\n
He nodded.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt first I din\u2019 notice we\u2019d stopped.\u201d<\/p>\n
A pause. Then, taking a long breath and straightening his shoulders, he remarked in a determined voice:<\/p>\n
\u201cWonder\u2019ff tell me where there\u2019s a gas\u2019line station?\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cBack out,\u201d he suggested after a moment. \u201cPut her in reverse.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut the wheel<\/i>\u2019s off!\u201d<\/p>\n
He hesitated.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo harm in trying,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I took dinner usually at the Yale Club\u2014for some reason it was the gloomiest event of my day\u2014and 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2014poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner\u2014young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.<\/p>\n
Again at eight o\u2019clock, 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed something\u2014most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don\u2019t in the beginning\u2014and 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\u2014and suddenly I remembered the story about her that had eluded me that night at Daisy\u2019s. At her first big golf tournament there was a row that nearly reached the newspapers\u2014a suggestion that she had moved her ball from a bad lie in the semifinal round. The thing approached the proportions of a scandal\u2014then 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply\u2014I 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\u2019s coat.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re a rotten driver,\u201d I protested. \u201cEither you ought to be more careful, or you oughtn\u2019t to drive at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI am careful.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, you\u2019re not.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, other people are,\u201d she said lightly.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s that got to do with it?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019ll keep out of my way,\u201d she insisted. \u201cIt takes two to make an accident.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSuppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope I never will,\u201d she answered. \u201cI hate careless people. That\u2019s why I like you.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019d been writing letters once a week and signing them: \u201cLove, Nick,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":299,"menu_order":4,"template":"","meta":{"pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[48],"contributor":[],"license":[],"class_list":["post-22","chapter","type-chapter","status-publish","hentry","chapter-type-numberless"],"part":3,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thegreatgatsby\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/22","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thegreatgatsby\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thegreatgatsby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thegreatgatsby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/299"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thegreatgatsby\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/22\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thegreatgatsby\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/22\/revisions\/80"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thegreatgatsby\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/3"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thegreatgatsby\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/22\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thegreatgatsby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thegreatgatsby\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=22"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thegreatgatsby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=22"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/thegreatgatsby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}