The Great Gatsby
Chapter 1
In my younger years my father gave me some advice. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”
He didn't say any more but I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. A habit to reserve all judgments has opened up many curious natures to me. In college I was privy to the secret grief's of wild, unknown men.
When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform. I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction – Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.
There was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. It was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person.
My family has been prominent, well-to-do people for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother who came here in fifty-one and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today. I never saw this great-uncle but I look like him – I saw a painting that hangs in father's office.
I graduated from New Haven[1] in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in the Great War. Then I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Father agreed to finance me for a year and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.
The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a cardboard bungalow at eighty a month. I had an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast, and muttered Finnish words to herself over the electric stove.
One morning some man stopped me on the road.
“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly.
I told him. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. The life was beginning over again with the summer.
There was so much to read. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold.
I lived at West Egg. I rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York. My house was between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was Gatsby's mansion.
Across the bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin. Her husband's name was Tom. I'd known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.
Tom's family was enormously wealthy – even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach. Why they came East I don't know. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn't believe it. They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there, wherever people played polo and were rich together.
And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing on the front porch.
Tom had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner.
He could not hide the enormous power of his body. It was a body capable of enormous leverage – a cruel body.
His voice was a gruff husky tenor. “Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final,” he seemed to say, “just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are.” We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he wanted me to like him.
We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.
“I've got a nice place here,” he said. He turned me around, politely and abruptly. “We'll go inside.”
We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space. The windows were ajar and gleaming. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags.
The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were lying. They were both in white. I stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall.
Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room. The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was completely motionless and with her chin raised a little.
The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise. She leaned slightly forward – then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.
“I'm p-paralyzed with happiness.”
She laughed again, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face.
She murmured that the surname of the other girl was Baker. Miss Baker's lips fluttered, she nodded at me and then quickly tipped her head back again.
I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth.
I told her how I had visited in Chicago some friends and how a dozen people had sent her their love.
“Do they miss me?” she cried.
“The whole town is desolate. All the automobiles are painted black and there's a persistent wail all night.”
“How gorgeous! Let's go back, Tom. Tomorrow!” Then she added irrelevantly: “You must see the baby.”
“I'd like to.”
“She's asleep. She's two years old. Haven't you ever seen her?”
“Never.”
“Well, you must see her. She's…”
Tom Buchanan rested his hand on my shoulder.
“What do you do, Nick?”
“I'm a bond man.”
“Who with?”
I told him.
“Never heard of them,” he remarked decisively.
This annoyed me.
“You will,” I answered shortly. “You will if you stay in the East.”
“Oh, I'll stay in the East, don't you worry,” he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me.
At this point Miss Baker said “Absolutely!” It was the first word she uttered since I came into the room. It surprised her as much as it did me. She yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.
“You see,” Daisy told Miss Baker. “I've been trying to get you to New York all afternoon.”
I looked at Miss Baker, I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender girl, with an erect carriage. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before.
“You live in West Egg,” she remarked contemptuously. “I know somebody there.”
“I don't know a single —”
“You must know Gatsby.”
“Gatsby?” demanded Daisy. “What Gatsby?”
Before I could reply that he was my neighbour dinner was announced. Tom Buchanan took me from the room. We went out.
The two young women preceded us toward the sunset where four candles flickered on the table.
“Why candles?” objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. “In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year.”
She looked at us all radiantly.
“Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it.”
“Let's plan something,” yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table.
“All right,” said Daisy. “What'll we plan?” She turned to me helplessly. “What do people plan?”
Before I could answer Daisy showed her little finger.
“Look!” she complained. “I hurt it.”
We all looked – the finger was black and blue.
“You did it, Tom,” she said. “I know you didn't mean to but you DID do it. Why did I marry such a man!”
She and Miss Baker accepted Tom and me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained.
“I feel uncivilized with you, Daisy,” I said.
“Civilization's going to pieces,” said Tom violently. “If we don't look out the white race will be submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved.”
“Tom is becoming a wise man,” said Daisy with an expression of sadness. “He reads clever books with long words in them. What was that word…”
“Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. “We, the dominant race, must watch out or these other races will have control of things.”
“If you lived in California – ” began Miss Baker but Tom interrupted her.
“This idea is that we – I, you, and you – we've produced all the things that go to make civilization – oh, science and art and all that. Do you see?”
There was something pathetic in his words. Suddenly the telephone rang and Tom left.
Daisy leaned toward me.
“I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a – of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn't he?” She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation: “An absolute rose?”
This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. Then she threw her napkin on the table and excused herself and went into the house.
Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance devoid of meaning.
“This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbor,” I said.
“Don't talk. I want to hear what happens.”
“Is something happening?” I inquired innocently.
“Don't you know?” said Miss Baker, honestly surprised. “I thought everybody knew.”
“I don't.”
“Tom's got some woman in New York,” said Miss Baker.
“Got some woman?” I repeated.
Miss Baker nodded.
“She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner-time. Don't you think?”
Tom and Daisy were back at the table.
Daisy sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me and said: “I looked outdoors for a minute and it's very romantic outdoors. There's a bird on the lawn, I think, a nightingale. He's singing so sweetly! It's romantic, isn't it, Tom?”
“Very romantic,” he said, and then to me: “After dinner I want to show you my horses.”
The telephone rang inside, and Daisy shook her head decisively. The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss Baker went into the library, while I followed Daisy around the house. Then we sat down side by side on a bench.
Daisy took her face in her hands.
“We don't know each other very well, Nick,” said Daisy. “Even if we are cousins. You didn't come to my wedding.”
“I wasn't back from the war.”
“That's true.” She hesitated. “Well, I've had a very bad time, and I'm pretty cynical about everything.”
I waited but she didn't say any more, and after a moment I decided to talk about her daughter.
“I suppose she talks, and – eats, and everything.”
“Oh, yes.” She looked at me absently. “Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?”
“Very much.”
“Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. 'All right,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool – that's the best thing for a girl in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
“You see I think everything's terrible anyhow,” she went on. “Everybody thinks so – the most advanced people. And I KNOW. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.”
Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light. Tom and Miss Baker sat on the long couch and she read aloud to him from the newspaper.
When we came in she held us silent for a moment with a lifted hand.
“To be continued,” she said, tossing the magazine on the table. She stood up.
“Ten o'clock,” she remarked. “Time for this good girl to go to bed.”
“Jordan's going to play at Westchester tomorrow,” explained Daisy.
“Oh – you're Jordan Baker!”
I knew now why her face was familiar – it had looked out at me from many pictures of the sporting life.
“Good night,” she said softly. “Wake me at eight, won't you?”
“But you won't get up.”
“I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you.”
“Of course you will,” confirmed Daisy. “In fact I think I'll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I'll make it. You know – push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing…”
“Good night,” called Miss Baker from the stairs. “I haven't heard anything.”
“She's a nice girl,” said Tom after a moment. “And her family…”
“Her family!” cried Daisy. “Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Nick will look after her, won't you, Nick? She's going to spend lots of week-ends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be very good for her.”
Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment in silence.
“Is she from New York?” I asked quickly.
“From Louisville. She's a friend from my girlhood.”
“Did you talk much to Nick on the veranda?” demanded Tom suddenly.
“Did I?” She looked at me. “I can't remember, but I think we talked about something. Yes, I'm sure we did.“
“Don't believe everything you hear, Nick,” he advised me.
I said that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes later I got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood side by side. As I started my motor Daisy called “Wait! I forgot to ask you something, and it's important. We heard you were going to marry?”
“That's right,” corroborated Tom kindly. “We heard that you were engaged.”
“It's nonsense. I'm too poor.”
“But we heard it,” insisted Daisy. “We heard it from three people so it must be true.”
Of course I knew what they were talking about, but I wasn't engaged. Indeed, I had an old friend, but I had no intention to marry.
When I reached my house, I sat for a while in the yard. I turned my head and I saw that I was not alone – fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the stars. It was Mr. Gatsby himself.
I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that could be the beginning of our conversation. But I didn't call to him: when I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone in the darkness.
Chapter 2
One day I met Tom Buchanan's mistress. Yes, Tom Buchanan had a mistress. He visited popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, wandered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her, I had no desire to meet her – but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped he jumped to his feet and forced me from the car.
“We're getting off!” he insisted. “I want you to meet my girl.”
He definitely decided to have my company. He thought that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do. I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence. I saw a garage – Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars Bought and Sold – and I followed Tom inside.
The interior was bare; the only automobile visible was the dust-covered Ford which stood in a dim corner. The proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blonde, spiritless, faintly handsome man.
“Hello, Wilson, old man,” said Tom, slapping him on the shoulder. “How's business?”
“I can't complain,” answered Wilson. “When are you going to sell me that automobile?”
“Next week. My man is working on it now.”
“He is working pretty slow, right?”
“No, he isn't,” said Tom coldly. “And if you think so, maybe I'd better sell it somewhere else after all.”
“I don't mean that,” explained Wilson quickly. “I just meant…”
Tom glanced impatiently around the garage. Then I heard footsteps on a stairs and saw a woman. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom. Then she spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice:
“Get some chairs, why don't you, so somebody can sit down.”
“Oh, sure,” agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office.
“I want to see you,” said Tom intently. “Get on the next train.”
“All right.”
“I'll meet you by the news-stand.”
She nodded and moved away from him. George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door.
We waited for her down the road and out of sight.
“Terrible place, isn't it?” said Tom.
“Awful.”
“It does her good to get away.”
“Doesn't her husband object?”
“Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York.“
So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up together to New York – or not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. At the news-stand she bought a copy of Town Tattle and a magazine, and in the station drug store some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Then said, pointing at the grey old man with a basket.
“I want one of those dogs,” she said. “I want to get one for the apartment. They're so nice.”
In a basket the grey old man had pretty puppies.
“What kind are they?” asked Mrs. Wilson.
“All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?”
“I'd like to get one of those police dogs[2]; do you have that kind?”
The man peered into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, by the back of the neck.
“That's no police dog,” said Tom.
“No, it's not exactly a police dog,” said the man with disappointment in his voice. “But look at that coat. Some coat. That's a dog that'll never get cold!”
“I think it's cute,” said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. “How much is it?”
“That dog?” He looked at it admiringly. “That dog will cost you ten dollars.”
The puppy settled down into Mrs. Wilson's lap.
“Is it a boy or a girl?” she asked delicately.
“That dog? That dog's a boy.”
“It's a bitch,” said Tom decisively. “Here's your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it.”
We drove over to Fifth Avenue, very warm and soft on the summer Sunday afternoon.
“Hold on,” I said, “I have to leave you here.”
“No, you don't,” interposed Tom quickly. “Myrtle'll be hurt if you don't come up to the apartment. Won't you, Myrtle?”
“Come on,” she urged. “I'll telephone my sister Catherine. They say she is very beautiful.”
“Well, I'd like to, but…”
We went on. At 158th Street the cab stopped. Mrs. Wilson gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went in.
The apartment was on the top floor – a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath. Several old copies of Town Tattle lay on the table together with some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey.
I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon. Sitting on Tom's lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner.
Then some people came – Myrtle's sister, Catherine, Mr. McKee, a pale feminine man from the flat below, and his wife.
Catherine was a slender girl of about thirty with red hair. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking of innumerable pottery bracelets upon her arms. She came in and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel.
Mr. McKee was most respectful in his greeting to everyone in the room. He informed me that he belonged to the “world of art” and I learned later that he was a photographer. His wife was shrill, languid, handsome and horrible. She told me with pride that her husband had photographed her a hundred and twenty-seven times since they had been married.
Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume and her personality had also changed. Her intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter and her gestures became different.
“My dear,” she told her sister, “most of these people will cheat you every time. All they think of is money.”
“I like your dress,” remarked Mrs. McKee, “I think it's wonderful.”
Mrs. Wilson rejected the compliment.
“It's just a crazy old thing,” she said. “I put it on sometimes when I don't care what I look like.”
“But it looks wonderful on you, if you know what I mean,” pursued Mrs. McKee. “If Chester could only get you in that pose!”
We all looked in silence at Mrs. Wilson who looked back at us with a brilliant smile. Mr. McKee regarded her intently.
“I would change the light,” he said after a moment.
“I wouldn't think it's reasonable,” cried Mrs. McKee. “I think it's…”
Her husband said “Sh!” and we all looked at the subject again whereupon Tom Buchanan yawned and got to his feet.
“You McKees have something to drink,” he said. “Get some more ice and mineral water, Myrtle.”
Myrtle raised her eyebrows, then she kissed the dog and went to the kitchen.
“I've done some nice things out on Long Island,” said Mr. McKee.
Tom looked at him.
“Two of them we have downstairs.”
“Two what?” demanded Tom.
“Two pictures. One of them I call 'Montauk Point – the Gulls,' and the other I call 'Montauk Point – the Sea.'”
The sister Catherine sat down beside me on the couch.
“Where do you live? On Long Island, too?” she inquired.
“I live at West Egg.”
“Really? I was down there at a party about a month ago. At a man named Gatsby's. Do you know him?”
“I live next door to him.”
“Well, they say he's a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm's. That's where all his money comes from.”
“Really?”
She nodded.
“I'm scared of him.”
Mr. McKee said, “I'd like to do more work on Long Island. All I need is a start.”
“Ask Myrtle,” said Tom. “She'll give you a letter of introduction, won't you, Myrtle?”
“What?” she asked, startled.
“You'll give McKee a letter of introduction to your husband, so he can make some pictures of him.” His lips moved silently. “'George B. Wilson at the Gasoline Pump,' or something like that.”
Catherine leaned close to me and whispered in my ear: “Neither of them can stand the person they're married to.”
“Can't they?”
“Can't STAND them.” She looked at Myrtle and then at Tom. “But why do they live with them if they can't stand them? I would get a divorce and get married to each other right away.”
“Doesn't she like Wilson either?”
The answer to this was unexpected. It came from Myrtle who had heard my question and it was violent and obscene, “Of course, not.”
“You see?” cried Catherine triumphantly. She lowered her voice again. “It's really his wife that's keeping them apart. She's a Catholic and they don't believe in divorce.”
Daisy was not a Catholic and I was a little shocked at this lie.
“When they get married,” continued Catherine, “they're going West to live for a while there.”
“Why not to Europe?”
“Oh, do you like Europe?” she exclaimed surprisingly. “I just got back from Monte Carlo.”
“Really?”
“Just last year. I went over there with a girl friend.”
“Stay long?”
“No, we just went to Monte Carlo and back. We had more than twelve hundred dollars when we started but we lost everything. God, how I hated that town!”
“I almost made a mistake, too,” Mrs. McKee declared vigorously. “I almost married a man who was below me. Everybody was saying to me: 'Lucille, that man's below you!' But luckily I met Chester!”
“Yes, but listen,” said Myrtle Wilson, nodding her head up and down, “at least you didn't marry him.”
“I know I didn't.”
“And I married him,” said Myrtle, ambiguously. “And that's the difference between your case and mine.”
“Why did you, Myrtle?” demanded Catherine. “Nobody forced you to.”
“I made a mistake,” she declared vigorously. “I married him because I thought he was a gentleman, but he wasn't fit to lick my shoe.”
“You were crazy about him for a while,” said Catherine.
“Crazy about him!” cried Myrtle incredulously. “Who said I was crazy about him? I never was any more crazy about him than I was about that man there.”
She pointed suddenly at me, and every one looked at me. I tried to smile.
“I was crazy only when I married him. He borrowed somebody's best suit to get married in, and never even told me about it, and the man came to take it back when he was out.”
She looked around to see who was listening: “'Oh, is that your suit?' I said. But I gave it to him and then I lay down and was crying all afternoon.”
“She really must divorce,” resumed Catherine to me. “They've been living over that garage for eleven years.”
The bottle of whiskey – a second one – appeared. I wanted to get out and walk away but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild argument.
Myrtle pulled her chair close to mine, and suddenly told me the story of her first meeting with Tom.
“We were sitting on the train, facing each other. I was going up to New York to see my sister and spend the night. Tom had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes and I couldn't keep my eyes off him. When we came into the station he was next to me – and so I told him I'd call a policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so excited when I got into a taxi with him. My only thought was 'You can't live forever, you can't live forever.'“
She turned to Mrs. McKee and gave an artificial laughter.
“My dear,” she cried, “I'm going to give you this dress one day. I'll buy another one tomorrow. I'm going to make a list of all the things I have to do. A massage, and a collar for the dog, and one of those cute little ash-trays, and a wreath with a black silk bow for mother's grave.”
It was ten o'clock. Mr. McKee was asleep on a chair. The little dog was sitting on the table looking with blind eyes through the smoke. People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other. At midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood face to face discussing whether Mrs. Wilson had any right to mention Daisy's name.
“Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!” shouted Mrs. Wilson. “I'll say it whenever I want to! Daisy! Dai…”
Making a short movement Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand.
Then there were bloody towels upon the bathroom floor, and women's voices. Mr. McKee awoke from his sleep and went toward the door. I took my hat and followed him.
“Come to lunch some day,” he suggested.
“Where?”
“Anywhere.”
“All right,” I agreed, “I'll be glad to.”
Then I was lying half asleep on the bench at the Pennsylvania Station, and waiting for the four o'clock train.
Chapter 3
There was music from my neighbour's house through the summer nights. In his gardens men and girls came and went like moths. 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. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city. And on Mondays eight servants toiled all day with mops and brushes and hammers, repairing the ravages of the night before.
Every Friday five boxes of oranges and lemons arrived from New York. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour.
By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived – oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos and low and high drums. Floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter and meetings between women who never knew each other's names.
Now the orchestra is playing cocktail music. Laughter is easier, the groups change more swiftly.
When 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. Sometimes they came and went without having met Gatsby at all.
I had been actually invited. A chauffeur in a uniform gave me a formal note from his employer – the honor would be entirely Jay Gatsby's, it said, if I would attend his “little party” that night.
Dressed up in white flannels I went over to his lawn a little after seven. I was immediately struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or insurance or automobiles.
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.
I noticed Jordan Baker with two girls in yellow dresses.
She 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.
“Hello!” I roared, advancing toward her. My voice seemed unnaturally loud across the garden.
“I thought I would meet you here,” she responded absently. “I remembered you lived next door to…”
“Hello!” the girls in yellow dresses cried together. “Sorry you didn't win.”
They were talking about the golf competition 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.”
“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. She turned to her companion: “You too, Lucille?”
Of course, Lucille, too.
“I like to come here,” 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 – and in some days I got a package with a new evening gown in it.”
“Did you accept it?” asked Jordan.
“Sure I did. I was going to wear it tonight, but it was too big for me. Two hundred and sixty-five dollars.”
“He doesn't want any trouble,” said the other girl eagerly, “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.”
“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, he grew up with him in Germany,” he assured us.
“Oh, no,” said the first girl, “it couldn't be that, because he was in the American army during the war. But just look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody's looking at him. I'll bet he killed a man.”
We all turned and looked around for Gatsby.
The first supper – there would be another one after midnight – was now being served, and Jordan invited me to join her around a table on the other side of the garden.
“Let's get out,” whispered Jordan, after half an hour.
We got up, and she explained that we were going to find the host.
The bar, where we went 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. We opened a heavy door, and walked into a library.
A stout, middle-aged man with enormous spectacles was sitting on the edge of a great table, staring at the shelves of books. As we entered he turned around and examined Jordan from head to foot.
“What do you think?” he demanded impetuously.
“About what?”
He waved his hand toward the book-shelves.
“About that. They're real.”
“The books?”
He nodded.
“Absolutely real – have pages and everything. I thought they were unreal. But they're absolutely real. Pages and – Here! Let me show you.”
He rushed to the bookcases and returned with a big volume.
“See!” he cried triumphantly. “It's a masterpiece. But he didn't cut the pages. What do you want? What do you expect?”
He took the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf.
“Who brought you?” he demanded. “Or did you just come? I was brought. Most people were brought.”
Jordan looked at him cheerfully without answering.
“I was brought by a woman named Roosevelt,” he continued. “Mrs. Roosevelt. Do you know her? I met her somewhere last night. I've been drunk for about a week now, and I decide to sit in a library.”
“And?”
“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.
I tried to find the host. I was still with Jordan Baker. We were sitting at a table with a man of about my age and a girl who was laughing all the time. I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two glasses of champagne.
The man looked at me and smiled.
“Your face is familiar,” he said, politely. “Weren't you in the Third Division during the war?”
“Why, yes. I was in the Ninth Battalion.”
“Oh! And I was in the Seventh Battalion. I knew I'd seen you somewhere before.”
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?”
“What time?”
“Any time that suits you best.”
I wanted to ask his name when Jordan looked around and smiled.
“Are you having a good time?” she inquired.
“Yes, I am.” 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, 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. It was one of those rare smiles, that you may come across four or five times in life. Almost at the moment when Mr. Gatsby identified himself a servant hurried toward him with the information that Chicago was calling him on the wire. He excused himself with a small bow.
“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.
“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?”
“Well, he told me once he was an Oxford man. 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.”
“Anyhow he gives large parties,” said Jordan, changing the subject. “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 was heard.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he cried. “At the request of Mr. Gatsby we are going to play for you Mr. Vladimir Tostoff's latest work which attracted so much attention at Carnegie Hall[3] last May. If you read the papers you know there was a big sensation – 'Jazz History of the World.'”
Gatsby was standing alone on the marble steps and looking from one group to another. I could see nothing sinister about him. Maybe he was not drinking at all.
“I beg your pardon.”
Gatsby's servant was 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, and followed the servant toward the house. I noticed that she wore her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes.
I was alone and it was almost two o'clock. 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. That lady was singing. She had drunk a quantity of champagne and she was not only singing, she was weeping too. Whenever there was a pause in the song she filled it with broken sobs. The tears coursed down her cheeks. Soon she sank into a chair and went off into a deep sleep.
“She had a fight with a man who says he's her husband,” explained a girl who was standing nearby.
I looked around. The hall was at present occupied by two men and their wives. The wives were talking to each other, “Whenever he sees I'm having a good time he wants to go home. We're always the first ones to leave.”
“So are we.”
“Well, we're almost the last tonight,” said one of the men. “The orchestra left half an hour ago.”
The door of the library opened and Jordan Baker and Gatsby came out together.
“I've just heard the most amazing story,” Jordan whispered to me. “How long were we in there?”
“Why – about an hour.”
“It was simply amazing,” she repeated. “But I swore I wouldn't tell it anybody.”
She yawned gracefully in my face. “Please come and see me… Phone book… Under the name of Mrs. Sigourney Howard… My aunt…”
I joined the last of Gatsby's guests who gathered around him. I wanted to apologize: I had not known him in the garden.
“Don't mention it, old sport,” he said. “And don't forget we're going up in the hydroplane tomorrow morning at nine o'clock.”
The servant behind his shoulder said:
“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. “Good night, old sport… Good night.”
As I walked down the steps I saw that the party was not over. In the ditch beside the road rested a new automobile which had left Gatsby's drive two minutes before. A dozen curious chauffeurs left their automobiles blocking the road and were watching the scene.
A man in a long coat had dismounted from the wreck and now stood in the middle of the road, looking from the automobile to the observers and from the observers to the automobile.
“See!” he explained. “It went in the ditch.”
I recognized the man – I met him in the Gatsby's library.
“How did 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 he. “I know very little about driving – next to nothing. It happened, and that's all I know.”
“Well, if you're a poor driver why did you drive at night?”
“But I wasn't driving,” he explained, “I wasn't even trying.”
“Do you want to commit suicide?”
“You don't understand,” explained he. “I wasn't driving. There's another man in the automobile.”
The door of the automobile slowly opened. The crowd – it was now a crowd – stepped back and when the door had opened wide there was a pause. Then, very gradually, part by part, a man appeared.
“What's the matter?” he inquired calmly.
“Look!”
Half a dozen fingers pointed at the wheel.
“It came off,” someone explained.
He nodded.
“At first I didn't notice we had stopped.”
A pause. Then he remarked in a determined voice:
“Could you tell me where is a gas station?”
At least a dozen men explained to him that wheel and automobile were no longer joined.
“We will drive slowly,” he said.
“But the WHEEL'S off!”
He hesitated.
“We will try,” he said.
I turned away and went toward home. I glanced back once. A moon was shining over Gatsby's house.
I began to like New York. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and watch romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives. For a while I lost sight of Jordan Baker, and then in midsummer I found her again. I liked to walk with her because she was a golf champion and every one knew her name. Then it was something more. I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of curiosity.
Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever men. She was incurably dishonest. But dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply. Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.
Chapter 4
On Sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages along shore everybody returned to Gatsby's house.
“He's a bootlegger[4],” 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 second cousin to the devil. Give me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that crystal glass.”
Once I wrote down the names of those who came to Gatsby's house that summer. I can still read the names and they will give you a good impression of those who accepted Gatsby's hospitality.
From East Egg 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 the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr. Chrystie's wife), and Edgar Beaver, whose hair turned white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all.
Clarence Endive was from East Egg, as I remember. He came only once and had a fight with a man named Etty in the garden. From farther side of 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 jail, he was lying drunk on the gravel drive, and 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 daughters.
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. 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. Ferret and the De Jongs and Ernest Lilly-they came to gamble, and when Ferret wandered into the garden it meant he lost.
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. Every time they were different, but they were very identical one with another. I have forgotten their names – Jaqueline, I think, or else Consuela or Gloria or Judy or June, and their last names were the melodious names of flowers and months.
In addition to all these I can remember Faustina O'Brien and the Baedeker girls and young Brewer and Mr. Albrucksburger and Miss Haag, his fiancée, and Ardita Fitz-Peters and Mr. P. Jewett, once head of the American Legion, and Miss Claudia Hip, with her chauffeur, and a prince of something, 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 automobile lurched up the rocky drive to my door. 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 today and I thought we'd ride up together.”
He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his automobile. He was never quite still. He saw me looking with admiration at his automobile.
“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. We sat down behind many layers of glass and started to town.
I had talked with him some times in the past month and found, to my disappointment, that he had little to say. So he had become simply the proprietor of a wonderful restaurant next door.
And then came that silly ride. Gatsby was leaving his elegant sentences unfinished.
“Look here, old sport,” he said surprisingly. “What's your opinion of me, anyhow?”
“Hm, I don't know much…” I began.
“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. I'll tell you the truth. 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.”
“What part of the Middle-West?” I inquired.
“San Francisco.”
“I see.”
“My family all died and I came into a good deal of money.”
His voice was solemn.
“After that I lived like a young prince in all the capitals of Europe – Paris, Venice, Rome – collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago. Then came the war, old sport. I was promoted to be a major. Here's a thing I always carry. A souvenir of Oxford days. The man on my left is now the Earl of Doncaster.”
It was a photograph of young men. There was Gatsby, looking a little, not much, younger – with a cricket bat in his hand.
Then it was all true.
“I'm going to make a big request of you today,” he said, “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 know 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.
He did not say another word. His correctness grew on him as we neared the city. We passed Port Roosevelt, and sped along the suburbs. I heard the familiar sound of the motorcycle, and a frantic policeman stood before us.
“All right, old sport,” said Gatsby. We slowed down. Taking a white card from his wallet he waved it before the policeman's eyes.
“All right,” agreed the policeman. “I'll know your automobile next time, Mr. Gatsby. Excuse me!”
“What was that?” I inquired. “The picture of Oxford?”
“I did the commissioner a favor once, and he sends me a Christmas card every year.”
The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, it shows its wild mystery and beauty.
“Anything can happen now,” I thought; “anything at all.”
At noon I met Gatsby for lunch. In the anteroom he was talking to a man.
“Mr. Carraway, this is my friend Mr. Wolfsheim.”
Gatsby took an arm of each of us and moved forward into the restaurant.
“This is a nice restaurant here,” said Mr. Wolfsheim looking at the nymphs on the ceiling. “But I like across the street better!”
“It's too hot over there,” agreed Gatsby.
“Hot and small – yes,” said Mr. Wolfsheim, “but full of memories.”
“What place is that?” I asked.
“The old Metropole.”
“The old Metropole,” said Mr. Wolfsheim gloomily. “Filled with faces dead and gone. Filled with friends gone now forever. I can't forget the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there. It was six of us at the table and Rosy was eating and drinking a lot all evening. When it was almost morning the waiter came up to him with a funny look and said somebody wanted 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.' It was four o'clock in the morning.”
“Did he go?” I asked innocently.
“Sure he went,” Mr. Wolfsheim said indignantly. “He turned around in the door and said, 'Don't let that waiter take away my coffee!' Then he went out 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. “I see you're looking for a business connection.”
I was surprised. Gatsby answered for me:
“Oh, no,” he exclaimed, “this isn't the man!”
“No?” Mr. Wolfsheim seemed disappointed.
“This is just a friend. I told you we'd talk about that some other time.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Wolfsheim, “I had a wrong man.”
Food arrived, and Mr. Wolfsheim began to eat.
“Look here, old sport,” said Gatsby, leaning toward me, “I'm afraid I made you a little angry this morning in the automobile.”
“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 do you talk about it with Miss Baker?”
“Oh, no mysteries at all,” he assured me. “Miss Baker's a great sportswoman, you know, and she'd never do anything wrong.”
Suddenly he looked at his watch, jumped up and hurried from the room leaving me with Mr. Wolfsheim at the table.
“He has to telephone,” said Mr. Wolfsheim, following him with his eyes. “Fine fellow, isn't he? Handsome and a perfect gentleman.”
“Yes.”
“He's an Oxford man.”
“Oh!”
“He went to Oxford University in England. Do you know Oxford University?”
“I've heard of it.”
“It's one of the most famous universities in the world.”
“Have you known Gatsby for a long time?” I inquired.
“Several years,” he answered. “I made the pleasure of his acquaintance just after the war. I said to myself: 'It's the man you can introduce to your mother and sister.' “ He paused. “I see you're looking at my cuff buttons.”
I was not looking at them, but I did now.
“Real human teeth,” he informed me.
“Well!” I inspected them. “That's a very interesting idea.”
“Yeah. You know, Gatsby's very careful about women. He will never look at a friend's wife.”
When Gatsby returned to the table and sat down, Mr. Wolfsheim drank his coffee and stood up.
“Thank you for the company,” he said.
“Don't hurry, Meyer,” said Gatsby, without enthusiasm.
“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… As for me, I am fifty years old.”
He shook hands and turned away.
“He becomes very sentimental sometimes,” explained Gatsby. “This is one of his sentimental days. He's well-know in New York.”
“Who is he anyhow – an actor?”
“No.”
“A dentist?”
“Meyer Wolfsheim? No, he's a gambler.”
I noticed Tom Buchanan.
“Come along with me for a minute,” I said. “I'll say hello to someone.”
When he saw us Tom jumped up.
“Where've you been?” he demanded eagerly. “Daisy's furious because you disappeared.”
“This is Mr. Gatsby, Mr. Buchanan.”
They shook hands briefly.
“How've you been, anyhow?” demanded Tom of me. “Why did I meet you here?”
“I was 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. I saw the red, white and blue banners in front of all the houses. The largest of the banners belonged to Daisy Fay's house. She was just eighteen, two years older than me, and the most popular of all the young girls in Louisville. She was wearing white dresses, and the telephone rang in her house all day long.
When I came opposite her house that morning, she was sitting in her automobile with a lieutenant I had never seen before.
“Hello Jordan,” she called unexpectedly. “Please come here.”
She was speaking, and the officer was looking at Daisy while she was speaking. The officer's name was Jay Gatsby and I had not seen 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 began to play in tournaments, so I didn't see Daisy very often. Wild rumors were circulating about her – how she was packing her bag one winter night to go to New York and say goodbye to a military man who was going overseas, and so on.
By the next autumn she was happy again, happy as ever. She was engaged to a man from New Orleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago. He came with a hundred people and hired a whole floor of the 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. She was lying on her bed – and as drunk as a monkey. She had a bottle of wine in one hand and a letter in the other.
“Gratulate me,” she muttered. “I was never drunk 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, dear.” She took a waste-basket and pulled out the string of pearls. “Take it downstairs and give it back to him. And tell them that Daisy has changed her mind. Say 'Daisy has changed her mind!'”
She began to cry – she cried and cried. I rushed out and found the maid and we locked the door and got her into a cold bath. She had the letter all the time. She took it into the tub with her and then it came to pieces like snow.
But she didn't say another word. We put ice on her forehead and dressed her 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.
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?” She liked to sit on the sand with his head in her lap looking at him with delight. That was in August. A week after I left Santa Barbara Tom ran into a van on the road one night. 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. Daisy was popular in Chicago, as you know. Her reputation is absolutely perfect. Perhaps because she doesn't drink. It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue.
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. 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 knew. And I connected this Gatsby with the officer in her white automobile.”
When Jordan Baker had finished her story we had left the Plaza. We were driving through Central Park.
“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. He wants to know, 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 so that he could “come over” some afternoon to a stranger.
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 was expecting her to one of his parties, some night,” went on Jordan, “but she never came. Then he began to ask people if they knew her, and I was the first one he found. When I said you were a particular friend of Tom's he wanted to cancel the whole idea. He doesn't know very much about Tom, though he says he's read a Chicago paper for years just to see Daisy's name.”
It was dark now, I put my arm around Jordan's golden shoulder and drew her toward me and asked her to dinner.
“And Daisy must have something in her life,” murmured Jordan to me.
“Does she want to see Gatsby?”
“She doesn't know anything about it. Gatsby doesn't want her to know. You'll just invite her to tea.”
Chapter 5
When I came home to West Egg that night I was afraid for a moment that my house was on fire. Two o'clock and everything was blazing with light. Turning a corner I saw that Gatsby's house was lit from roof to cellar.
At first I thought it was another party. But there wasn't a sound. Only wind in the trees which blew the wires. My taxi went away and I saw Gatsby. He was walking toward me across his lawn.
“Your place looks like the world's fair,” I said.
“Does it?” He turned his eyes toward it absently. “Let's go to Coney Island, old sport. In my automobile.”
“It's too late.”
“Well, then maybe a swimming pool? I haven't used it all summer.”
“I've got to go to bed.”
“All right.”
He waited, looking at me.
“I talked with Miss Baker,” I said after a moment. “I'm going to call up Daisy tomorrow and invite her over here to tea.”
“Oh, that's all right,” he said carelessly. “I don't want to put you to any trouble.”
“What day would suit you?”
“What day would suit YOU?” he corrected me quickly. “I don't want to put you to any trouble, you see.”
“How about the day after tomorrow?” He considered for a moment. Then, with reluctance:
“I want to get the grass cut,” he said.
We both looked at the grass. I suspected that he meant my grass.
“There's another little thing,” he said uncertainly, and hesitated.
“So maybe later?” I asked.
“Oh, it isn't about that. At least… Why, I thought – why, look here, old sport, you don't make much money, do you?”
“Not very much.”
This reassured him and he continued more confidently.
“I thought you didn't, if you'll pardon my – you see, I carry on a little business, you understand. And I thought that if you don't make very much – you're selling bonds, aren't you, old sport?”
“Trying to.”
“Well, this would interest you. It wouldn't take up much of your time and you might pick up a nice bit of money. But it is rather confidential.”
I realize now that under different circumstances that conversation might change my life. But the offer was tactless enough. I had to refuse.
“I'm very busy at the moment,” I said. “I'm much obliged but I can't work more.”
“You won't have any business with Wolfsheim.”
He waited a moment longer, hoping I'd begin a conversation, but I did not want to talk to him, so he went unwillingly home.
I called up Daisy from the office next morning and invited her to come to tea.
“Don't bring Tom,” I warned her.
“What?”
“Don't bring Tom.”
“Who is 'Tom'?” she asked innocently.
It was a rainy day. At eleven o'clock a man in a raincoat with a lawn-mower tapped at my front door and said that Mr. Gatsby had sent him over to cut my grass. At two o'clock many flowers arrived from Gatsby's. An hour later the front door opened nervously, and Gatsby in a white flannel suit, silver shirt and gold-colored tie went in. He was pale and there were dark signs of sleeplessness beneath his eyes.
“Is everything all right?” he asked immediately.
“The grass looks fine, if that's what you mean.”
“What grass?” he inquired. “Oh, the grass in the yard.”
He looked out the window at it, but I don't think he saw a thing.