Much better. I turned again to my new acquaintance. This is an unusual party for me. I havent even seen the host. I live over there I waved my hand at the invisible hedge in the distance, and this man Gatsby sent over his chauffeur with an invitation.
For a moment he looked at me as if he failed to understand.
Im Gatsby, he said suddenly.
What! I exclaimed. Oh, I beg your pardon.
I thought you knew, old sport. Im afraid Im not a very good host.
He smiled understandingly much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced or seemed to face the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself Id got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.
Almost at the moment when Mr. Gatsby identified himself a butler hurried toward him with the information that Chicago was calling him on the wire. He excused himself with a small bow that included each of us in turn.
If you want anything just ask for it, old sport, he urged me. Excuse me. I will rejoin you later.
When he was gone I turned immediately to Jordan constrained to assure her of my surprise. I had expected that Mr. Gatsby would be a florid and corpulent person in his middle years.
Who is he? I demanded. Do you know?
Hes just a man named Gatsby.
Where is he from, I mean? And what does he do?
Now youre started on the subject, she answered with a wan smile. Well, he told me once he was an Oxford man.
A dim background started to take shape behind him, but at her next remark it faded away.
A dim background started to take shape behind him, but at her next remark it faded away.
However, I dont believe it.
Why not?
I dont know, she insisted, I just dont think he went there.
Something in her tone reminded me of the other girls I think he killed a man, and had the effect of stimulating my curiosity. I would have accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York. That was comprehensible. But young men didnt at least in my provincial inexperience I believed they didnt drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island Sound.
Anyhow, he gives large parties, said Jordan, changing the subject with an urban distaste for the concrete. And I like large parties. Theyre so intimate. At small parties there isnt any privacy.
There was the boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the orchestra leader rang out suddenly above the echolalia of the garden.
Ladies and gentlemen, he cried. At the request of Mr. Gatsby we are going to play for you Mr. Vladimir Tostoffs latest work, which attracted so much attention at Carnegie Hall[50] last May. If you read the papers you know there was a big sensation. He smiled with jovial condescension, and added: Some sensation! Where upon everybody laughed.
The piece is known, he concluded lustily, as Vladimir Tostoffs Jazz History of the World.
The nature of Mr. Tostoffs composition eluded me, because just as it began my eyes fell on Gatsby, standing alone on the marble steps and looking from one group to another with approving eyes. His tanned skin was drawn attractively tight on his face and his short hair looked as though it were trimmed every day. I could see nothing sinister about him. I wondered if the fact that he was not drinking helped to set him off from his guests, for it seemed to me that he grew more correct as the fraternal hilarity increased. When the Jazz History of the World was over, girls were putting their heads on mens shoulders in a puppyish, convivial way, girls were swooning backward playfully into mens arms, even into groups, knowing that someone would arrest their falls but no one swooned backward on Gatsby, and no French bob touched Gatsbys shoulder, and no singing quartets were formed for Gatsbys head for one link.
I beg your pardon.
Gatsbys butler was suddenly standing beside us.
Miss Baker? he inquired. I beg your pardon, but Mr. Gatsby would like to speak to you alone.
With me? she exclaimed in surprise.
Yes, madame.
She got up slowly, raising her eyebrows at me in astonishment, and followed the butler toward the house. I noticed that she wore her evening-dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings.
I was alone and it was almost two. For some time confused and intriguing sounds had issued from a long, many-windowed room which overhung the terrace. Eluding Jordans undergraduate, who was now engaged in an obstetrical conversation with two chorus girls, and who implored me to join him, I went inside.
The large room was full of people. One of the girls in yellow was playing the piano, and beside her stood a tall, red-haired young lady from a famous chorus, engaged in song. She had drunk a quantity of champagne, and during the course of her song she had decided, ineptly, that everything was very, very sad she was not only singing, she was weeping too. Whenever there was a pause in the song she filled it with gasping, broken sobs, and then took up the lyric again in a quavering soprano. The tears coursed down her cheeks not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky colour, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets. A humorous suggestion was made that she sing the notes on her face, whereupon she threw up her hands, sank into a chair, and went off into a deep vinous sleep.
She had a fight with a man who says hes her husband, explained a girl at my elbow.
I looked around. Most of the remaining women were now having fights with men said to be their husbands. Even Jordans party, the quartet from East Egg, were rent asunder by dissension. One of the men was talking with curious intensity to a young actress, and his wife, after attempting to laugh at the situation in a dignified and indifferent way, broke down entirely and resorted to flank attacks at intervals she appeared suddenly at his side like an angry diamond, and hissed: You promised! into his ear.
The reluctance to go home was not confined to wayward men. The hall was at present occupied by two deplorably sober men and their highly indignant wives. The wives were sympathizing with each other in slightly raised voices.
Whenever he sees Im having a good time he wants to go home.
Never heard anything so selfish in my life.
Were always the first ones to leave.
So are we.
Well, were almost the last tonight, said one of the men sheepishly. The orchestra left half an hour ago.
In spite of the wives agreement that such malevolence was beyond credibility, the dispute ended in a short struggle, and both wives were lifted, kicking, into the night.
As I waited for my hat in the hall the door of the library opened and Jordan Baker and Gatsby came out together. He was saying some last word to her, but the eagerness in his manner tightened abruptly into formality as several people approached him to say goodbye.
Jordans party were calling impatiently to her from the porch, but she lingered for a moment to shake hands.
Ive just heard the most amazing thing, she whispered. How long were we in there?
Why, about an hour.
It was simply amazing, she repeated abstractedly. But I swore I wouldnt tell it and here I am tantalizing you. She yawned gracefully in my face. Please come and see me Phone book Under the name of Mrs. Sigourney Howard My aunt She was hurrying off as she talked her brown hand waved a jaunty salute as she melted into her party at the door.
Rather ashamed that on my first appearance I had stayed so late, I joined the last of Gatsbys guests, who were clustered around him. I wanted to explain that Id hunted for him early in the evening and to apologize for not having known him in the garden.
Dont mention it, he enjoined me eagerly. Dont give it another thought, old sport. The familiar expression held no more familiarity than the hand which reassuringly brushed my shoulder. And dont forget were going up in the hydroplane tomorrow morning, at nine oclock.
Then the butler, behind his shoulder:
Philadelphia wants you on the phone, sir.
All right, in a minute. Tell them Ill be right there Good night.
Good night.
Good night. He smiled and suddenly there seemed to be a pleasant significance in having been among the last to go, as if he had desired it all the time. Good night, old sport Good night.
But as I walked down the steps I saw that the evening was not quite over. Fifty feet from the door a dozen headlights illuminated a bizarre and tumultuous scene. In the ditch beside the road, right side up, but violently shorn of one wheel, rested a new coupe which had left Gatsbys drive not two minutes before. The sharp jut of a wall accounted for the detachment of the wheel which was now getting considerable attention from half a dozen curious chauffeurs. However, as they had left their cars blocking the road, a harsh, discordant din from those in the rear had been audible for some time, and added to the already violent confusion of the scene.
A man in a long duster had dismounted from the wreck and now stood in the middle of the road, looking from the car to the tyre and from the tyre to the observers in a pleasant, puzzled way.
See! he explained. It went in the ditch.
The fact was infinitely astonishing to him, and I recognized first the unusual quality of wonder, and then the man it was the late patron of Gatsbys library.
Howd 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?
Dont ask me, said Owl Eyes, washing his hands of the whole matter. I know very little about driving next to nothing. It happened, and thats all I know.