III

There was music from my neighbour’s house through the summer nights.

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the

whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the

afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or

taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motorboats

slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of

foam. On weekends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties

to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past

midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to

meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra

gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers

and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.

Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a

fruiterer in New York—every Monday these same oranges and lemons left

his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in

the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in

half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a

butler’s thumb.

At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several

hundred feet of canvas and enough coloured lights to make a Christmas

tree of Gatsby’s enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with

glistening hors-d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of

harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark

gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and

stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that

most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.

By seven o’clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair,

but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and

cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The last swimmers have

come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from

New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and

salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colours, and hair bobbed in

strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is

in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden

outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual

innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic

meetings between women who never knew each other’s names.

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and

now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of

voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute,

spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups

change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the

same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave

here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp,

joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph,

glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and colour under

the constantly changing light.

Suddenly one of these gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail

out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like

Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the

orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a

burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda

Gray’s understudy from the Follies. The party has begun.

I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one

of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not

invited—they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out

to Long Island, and somehow they ended up at Gatsby’s door. Once there

they were introduced by somebody who knew Gatsby, and after that they

conducted themselves according to the rules of behaviour associated

with an amusement park. Sometimes they came and went without having

met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that

was its own ticket of admission.

I had been actually invited. A chauffeur in a uniform of robin’s-egg

blue crossed my lawn early that Saturday morning with a surprisingly

formal note from his employer: the honour would be entirely Gatsby’s,

it said, if I would attend his “little party” that night. He had seen

me several times, and had intended to call on me long before, but a

peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it—signed Jay

Gatsby, in a majestic hand.

Dressed up in white flannels I went over to his lawn a little after

seven, and wandered around rather ill at ease among swirls and eddies

of people I didn’t know—though here and there was a face I had noticed

on the commuting train. I was immediately struck by the number of

young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little

hungry, and all talking in low, earnest voices to solid and prosperous

Americans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or

insurance or automobiles. They were at least agonizingly aware of the

easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few

words in the right key.

As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host, but the two or

three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an

amazed way, and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements,

that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table—the only place

in the garden where a single man could linger without looking

purposeless and alone.

I was on my way to get roaring drunk from sheer embarrassment when

Jordan Baker came out of the house and stood at the head of the marble

steps, leaning a little backward and looking with contemptuous

interest down into the garden.

Welcome or not, I found it necessary to attach myself to someone

before I should begin to address cordial remarks to the passersby.

“Hello!” I roared, advancing toward her. My voice seemed unnaturally

loud across the garden.

“I thought you might be here,” she responded absently as I came up.

“I remembered you lived next door to—”

She held my hand impersonally, as a promise that she’d take care of me

in a minute, and gave ear to two girls in twin yellow dresses, who

stopped at the foot of the steps.

“Hello!” they cried together. “Sorry you didn’t win.”

That was for the golf tournament. She had lost in the finals the week

before.

“You don’t know who we are,” said one of the girls in yellow, “but we

met you here about a month ago.”

“You’ve dyed your hair since then,” remarked Jordan, and I started,

but the girls had moved casually on and her remark was addressed to

the premature moon, produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a

caterer’s basket. With Jordan’s slender golden arm resting in mine, we

descended the steps and sauntered about the garden. A tray of

cocktails floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a

table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced

to us as Mr. Mumble.

“Do you come to these parties often?” inquired Jordan of the girl

beside her.

“The last one was the one I met you at,” answered the girl, in an

alert confident voice. She turned to her companion: “Wasn’t it for

you, Lucille?”

It was for Lucille, too.

“I like to come,” Lucille said. “I never care what I do, so I always

have a good time. When I was here last I tore my gown on a chair, and

he asked me my name and address—inside of a week I got a package from

Croirier’s with a new evening gown in it.”

“Did you keep it?” asked Jordan.

“Sure I did. I was going to wear it tonight, but it was too big in the

bust and had to be altered. It was gas blue with lavender beads. Two

hundred and sixty-five dollars.”

“There’s something funny about a fellow that’ll do a thing like that,”

said the other girl eagerly. “He doesn’t want any trouble with

anybody.”

“Who doesn’t?” I inquired.

“Gatsby. Somebody told me—”

The two girls and Jordan leaned together confidentially.

“Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.”

A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and

listened eagerly.

“I don’t think it’s so much that,” argued Lucille sceptically; “It’s

more that he was a German spy during the war.”

One of the men nodded in confirmation.

“I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in

Germany,” he assured us positively.

“Oh, no,” said the first girl, “it couldn’t be that, because he was in

the American army during the war.” As our credulity switched back to

her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. “You look at him sometimes

when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man.”

She narrowed her eyes and shivered. Lucille shivered. We all turned

and looked around for Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic

speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those

who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this

world.

The first supper—there would be another one after midnight—was now

being served, and Jordan invited me to join her own party, who were

spread around a table on the other side of the garden. There were

three married couples and Jordan’s escort, a persistent undergraduate

given to violent innuendo, and obviously under the impression that

sooner or later Jordan was going to yield him up her person to a

greater or lesser degree. Instead of rambling, this party had

preserved a dignified homogeneity, and assumed to itself the function

of representing the staid nobility of the countryside—East Egg

condescending to West Egg and carefully on guard against its

spectroscopic gaiety.

“Let’s get out,” whispered Jordan, after a somehow wasteful and

inappropriate half-hour; “this is much too polite for me.”

We got up, and she explained that we were going to find the host: I

had never met him, she said, and it was making me uneasy. The

undergraduate nodded in a cynical, melancholy way.

The bar, where we glanced first, was crowded, but Gatsby was not

there. She couldn’t find him from the top of the steps, and he wasn’t

on the veranda. On a chance we tried an important-looking door, and

walked into a high Gothic library, panelled with carved English oak,

and probably transported complete from some ruin overseas.

A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles, was

sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with

unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he

wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot.

“What do you think?” he demanded impetuously.

“About what?”

He waved his hand toward the bookshelves.

“About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I

ascertained. They’re real.”

“The books?”

He nodded.

“Absolutely real—have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice

durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. Pages

and—Here! Lemme show you.”

Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and

returned with Volume One of the Stoddard Lectures.

“See!” he cried triumphantly. “It’s a bona-fide piece of printed

matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a

triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop,

too—didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”

He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf,

muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable

to collapse.

“Who brought you?” he demanded. “Or did you just come? I was brought.

Most people were brought.”

Jordan looked at him alertly, cheerfully, without answering.

“I was brought by a woman named Roosevelt,” he continued. “Mrs. Claud

Roosevelt. Do you know her? I met her somewhere last night. I’ve been

drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit

in a library.”

“Has it?”

“A little bit, I think. I can’t tell yet. I’ve only been here an hour.

Did I tell you about the books? They’re real. They’re—”

“You told us.”

We shook hands with him gravely and went back outdoors.

There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden; old men pushing

young girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior couples

holding each other tortuously, fashionably, and keeping in the

corners—and a great number of single girls dancing individually or

relieving the orchestra for a moment of the burden of the banjo or the

traps. By midnight the hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor had

sung in Italian, and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz, and

between the numbers people were doing “stunts” all over the garden,

while happy, vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky. A

pair of stage twins, who turned out to be the girls in yellow, did a

baby act in costume, and champagne was served in glasses bigger than

finger-bowls. The moon had risen higher, and floating in the Sound was

a triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny

drip of the banjoes on the lawn.

I was still with Jordan Baker. We were sitting at a table with a man

of about my age and a rowdy little girl, who gave way upon the

slightest provocation to uncontrollable laughter. I was enjoying

myself now. I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene

had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and

profound.

At a lull in the entertainment the man looked at me and smiled.

“Your face is familiar,” he said politely. “Weren’t you in the First

Division during the war?”

“Why yes. I was in the Twenty-eighth Infantry.”

“I was in the Sixteenth until June nineteen-eighteen. I knew I’d seen

you somewhere before.”

We talked for a moment about some wet, grey little villages in France.

Evidently he lived in this vicinity, for he told me that he had just

bought a hydroplane, and was going to try it out in the morning.

“Want to go with me, old sport? Just near the shore along the Sound.”

“What time?”

“Any time that suits you best.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask his name when Jordan looked

around and smiled.

“Having a gay time now?” she inquired.

“Much better.” I turned again to my new acquaintance. “This is an

unusual party for me. I haven’t even seen the host. I live over

there—” I waved my hand at the invisible hedge in the distance, “and

this man Gatsby sent over his chauffeur with an invitation.”

For a moment he looked at me as if he failed to understand.

“I’m Gatsby,” he said suddenly.

“What!” I exclaimed. “Oh, I beg your pardon.”

“I thought you knew, old sport. I’m afraid I’m not a very good host.”

He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one

of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that

you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to

face—the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on

you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you

just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you

would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had

precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to

convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an

elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate

formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he

introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his

words with care.

Almost at the moment when Mr. Gatsby identified himself a butler

hurried toward him with the information that Chicago was calling him

on the wire. He excused himself with a small bow that included each of

us in turn.

“If you want anything just ask for it, old sport,” he urged me.

“Excuse me. I will rejoin you later.”

When he was gone I turned immediately to Jordan—constrained to assure

her of my surprise. I had expected that Mr. Gatsby would be a florid

and corpulent person in his middle years.

“Who is he?” I demanded. “Do you know?”

“He’s just a man named Gatsby.”

“Where is he from, I mean? And what does he do?”

“Now you’re started on the subject,” she answered with a wan smile.

“Well, he told me once he was an Oxford man.”

A dim background started to take shape behind him, but at her next

remark it faded away.

“However, I don’t believe it.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know,” she insisted, “I just don’t think he went there.”

Something in her tone reminded me of the other girl’s “I think he

killed a man,” and had the effect of stimulating my curiosity. I would

have accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang from

the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York. That

was comprehensible. But young men didn’t—at least in my provincial

inexperience I believed they didn’t—drift coolly out of nowhere and

buy a palace on Long Island Sound.

“Anyhow, he gives large parties,” said Jordan, changing the subject

with an urban distaste for the concrete. “And I like large parties.

They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”

There was the boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the orchestra

leader rang out suddenly above the echolalia of the garden.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he cried. “At the request of Mr. Gatsby we are

going to play for you Mr. Vladmir Tostoff’s latest work, which

attracted so much attention at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the

papers you know there was a big sensation.” He smiled with jovial

condescension, and added: “Some sensation!” Whereupon everybody

laughed.

“The piece is known,” he concluded lustily, “as ‘Vladmir Tostoff’s

Jazz History of the World!’ ”

The nature of Mr. Tostoff’s composition eluded me, because just as it

began my eyes fell on Gatsby, standing alone on the marble steps and

looking from one group to another with approving eyes. His tanned skin

was drawn attractively tight on his face and his short hair looked as

though it were trimmed every day. I could see nothing sinister about

him. I wondered if the fact that he was not drinking helped to set him

off from his guests, for it seemed to me that he grew more correct as

the fraternal hilarity increased. When the “Jazz History of the World”

was over, girls were putting their heads on men’s shoulders in a

puppyish, convivial way, girls were swooning backward playfully into

men’s arms, even into groups, knowing that someone would arrest their

falls—but no one swooned backward on Gatsby, and no French bob touched

Gatsby’s shoulder, and no singing quartets were formed with Gatsby’s

head for one link.

“I beg your pardon.”

Gatsby’s butler was suddenly standing beside us.

“Miss Baker?” he inquired. “I beg your pardon, but Mr. Gatsby would

like to speak to you alone.”

“With me?” she exclaimed in surprise.

“Yes, madame.”

She got up slowly, raising her eyebrows at me in astonishment, and

followed the butler toward the house. I noticed that she wore her

evening-dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes—there was a

jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk

upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings.

I was alone and it was almost two. For some time confused and

intriguing sounds had issued from a long, many-windowed room which

overhung the terrace. Eluding Jordan’s undergraduate, who was now

engaged in an obstetrical conversation with two chorus girls, and who

implored me to join him, I went inside.

The large room was full of people. One of the girls in yellow was

playing the piano, and beside her stood a tall, red-haired young lady

from a famous chorus, engaged in song. She had drunk a quantity of

champagne, and during the course of her song she had decided, ineptly,

that everything was very, very sad—she was not only singing, she was

weeping too. Whenever there was a pause in the song she filled it with

gasping, broken sobs, and then took up the lyric again in a quavering

soprano. The tears coursed down her cheeks—not freely, however, for

when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they

assumed an inky colour, and pursued the rest of their way in slow

black rivulets. A humorous suggestion was made that she sing the notes

on her face, whereupon she threw up her hands, sank into a chair, and

went off into a deep vinous sleep.

“She had a fight with a man who says he’s her husband,” explained a

girl at my elbow.

I looked around. Most of the remaining women were now having fights

with men said to be their husbands. Even Jordan’s party, the quartet

from East Egg, were rent asunder by dissension. One of the men was

talking with curious intensity to a young actress, and his wife, after

attempting to laugh at the situation in a dignified and indifferent

way, broke down entirely and resorted to flank attacks—at intervals

she appeared suddenly at his side like an angry diamond, and hissed:

“You promised!” into his ear.

The reluctance to go home was not confined to wayward men. The hall

was at present occupied by two deplorably sober men and their highly

indignant wives. The wives were sympathizing with each other in

slightly raised voices.

“Whenever he sees I’m having a good time he wants to go home.”

“Never heard anything so selfish in my life.”

“We’re always the first ones to leave.”

“So are we.”

“Well, we’re almost the last tonight,” said one of the men sheepishly.

“The orchestra left half an hour ago.”

In spite of the wives’ agreement that such malevolence was beyond

credibility, the dispute ended in a short struggle, and both wives

were lifted, kicking, into the night.

As I waited for my hat in the hall the door of the library opened and

Jordan Baker and Gatsby came out together. He was saying some last

word to her, but the eagerness in his manner tightened abruptly into

formality as several people approached him to say goodbye.

Jordan’s party were calling impatiently to her from the porch, but she

lingered for a moment to shake hands.

“I’ve just heard the most amazing thing,” she whispered. “How long

were we in there?”

“Why, about an hour.”

“It was … simply amazing,” she repeated abstractedly. “But I swore I

wouldn’t tell it and here I am tantalizing you.” She yawned gracefully

in my face. “Please come and see me … Phone book … Under the name of

Mrs. Sigourney Howard … My aunt …” She was hurrying off as she

talked—her brown hand waved a jaunty salute as she melted into her

party at the door.

Rather ashamed that on my first appearance I had stayed so late, I

joined the last of Gatsby’s guests, who were clustered around him. I

wanted to explain that I’d hunted for him early in the evening and to

apologize for not having known him in the garden.

“Don’t mention it,” he enjoined me eagerly. “Don’t give it another

thought, old sport.” The familiar expression held no more familiarity

than the hand which reassuringly brushed my shoulder. “And don’t

forget we’re going up in the hydroplane tomorrow morning, at nine

o’clock.”

Then the butler, behind his shoulder:

“Philadelphia wants you on the phone, sir.”

“All right, in a minute. Tell them I’ll be right there … Good night.”

“Good night.”

“Good night.” He smiled—and suddenly there seemed to be a pleasant

significance in having been among the last to go, as if he had desired

it all the time. “Good night, old sport … Good night.”

But as I walked down the steps I saw that the evening was not quite

over. Fifty feet from the door a dozen headlights illuminated a

bizarre and tumultuous scene. In the ditch beside the road, right side

up, but violently shorn of one wheel, rested a new coupé which had

left Gatsby’s drive not two minutes before. The sharp jut of a wall

accounted for the detachment of the wheel, which was now getting

considerable attention from half a dozen curious chauffeurs. However,

as they had left their cars blocking the road, a harsh, discordant din

from those in the rear had been audible for some time, and added to

the already violent confusion of the scene.

A man in a long duster had dismounted from the wreck and now stood in

the middle of the road, looking from the car to the tyre and from the

tyre to the observers in a pleasant, puzzled way.

“See!” he explained. “It went in the ditch.”

The fact was infinitely astonishing to him, and I recognized first the

unusual quality of wonder, and then the man—it was the late patron of

Gatsby’s library.

“How’d it happen?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“I know nothing whatever about mechanics,” he said decisively.

“But how did it happen? Did you run into the wall?”

“Don’t ask me,” said Owl Eyes, washing his hands of the whole

matter. “I know very little about driving—next to nothing. It

happened, and that’s all I know.”

“Well, if you’re a poor driver you oughtn’t to try driving at night.”

“But I wasn’t even trying,” he explained indignantly, “I wasn’t even

trying.”

An awed hush fell upon the bystanders.

“Do you want to commit suicide?”

“You’re lucky it was just a wheel! A bad driver and not even trying!”

“You don’t understand,” explained the criminal. “I wasn’t driving.

There’s another man in the car.”

The shock that followed this declaration found voice in a sustained

“Ah-h-h!” as the door of the coupé swung slowly open. The crowd—it was

now a crowd—stepped back involuntarily, and when the door had opened

wide there was a ghostly pause. Then, very gradually, part by part, a

pale, dangling individual stepped out of the wreck, pawing tentatively

at the ground with a large uncertain dancing shoe.

Blinded by the glare of the headlights and confused by the incessant

groaning of the horns, the apparition stood swaying for a moment

before he perceived the man in the duster.

“Wha’s matter?” he inquired calmly. “Did we run outa gas?”

“Look!”

Half a dozen fingers pointed at the amputated wheel—he stared at it

for a moment, and then looked upward as though he suspected that it

had dropped from the sky.

“It came off,” someone explained.

He nodded.

“At first I din’ notice we’d stopped.”

A pause. Then, taking a long breath and straightening his shoulders,

he remarked in a determined voice:

“Wonder’ff tell me where there’s a gas’line station?”

At least a dozen men, some of them a little better off than he was,

explained to him that wheel and car were no longer joined by any

physical bond.

“Back out,” he suggested after a moment. “Put her in reverse.”

“But the wheel’s off!”

He hesitated.

“No harm in trying,” he said.

The caterwauling horns had reached a crescendo and I turned away and

cut across the lawn toward home. I glanced back once. A wafer of a

moon was shining over Gatsby’s house, making the night fine as before,

and surviving the laughter and the sound of his still glowing garden.

A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great

doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host, who

stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Reading over what I have written so far, I see I have given the

impression that the events of three nights several weeks apart were

all that absorbed me. On the contrary, they were merely casual events

in a crowded summer, and, until much later, they absorbed me

infinitely less than my personal affairs.

Most of the time I worked. In the early morning the sun threw my

shadow westward as I hurried down the white chasms of lower New York

to the Probity Trust. I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen

by their first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded

restaurants on little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee. I

even had a short affair with a girl who lived in Jersey City and

worked in the accounting department, but her brother began throwing

mean looks in my direction, so when she went on her vacation in July I

let it blow quietly away.

I took dinner usually at the Yale Club—for some reason it was the

gloomiest event of my day—and then I went upstairs to the library and

studied investments and securities for a conscientious hour. There

were generally a few rioters around, but they never came into the

library, so it was a good place to work. After that, if the night was

mellow, I strolled down Madison Avenue past the old Murray Hill Hotel,

and over 33rd Street to the Pennsylvania Station.

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night,

and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and

machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue

and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few

minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever

know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their

apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and

smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm

darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting

loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others—poor young clerks who

loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary

restaurant dinner—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant

moments of night and life.

Again at eight o’clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were lined

five deep with throbbing taxicabs, bound for the theatre district, I

felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they

waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes,

and lighted cigarettes made unintelligible circles inside. Imagining

that I, too, was hurrying towards gaiety and sharing their intimate

excitement, I wished them well.

For a while I lost sight of Jordan Baker, and then in midsummer I

found her again. At first I was flattered to go places with her,

because she was a golf champion, and everyone knew her name. Then it

was something more. I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of

tender curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the world

concealed something—most affectations conceal something eventually,

even though they don’t in the beginning—and one day I found what it

was. When we were on a house-party together up in Warwick, she left a

borrowed car out in the rain with the top down, and then lied about

it—and suddenly I remembered the story about her that had eluded me

that night at Daisy’s. At her first big golf tournament there was a

row that nearly reached the newspapers—a suggestion that she had moved

her ball from a bad lie in the semifinal round. The thing approached

the proportions of a scandal—then died away. A caddy retracted his

statement, and the only other witness admitted that he might have been

mistaken. The incident and the name had remained together in my mind.

Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw

that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence

from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest.

She wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this

unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she

was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to

the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body.

It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you

never blame deeply—I was casually sorry, and then I forgot. It was on

that same house-party that we had a curious conversation about driving

a car. It started because she passed so close to some workmen that our

fender flicked a button on one man’s coat.

“You’re a rotten driver,” I protested. “Either you ought to be more

careful, or you oughtn’t to drive at all.”

“I am careful.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Well, other people are,” she said lightly.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“They’ll keep out of my way,” she insisted. “It takes two to make an

accident.”

“Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.”

“I hope I never will,” she answered. “I hate careless people. That’s

why I like you.”

Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had

deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved

her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as

brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself

definitely out of that tangle back home. I’d been writing letters once

a week and signing them: “Love, Nick,” and all I could think of was

how, when that certain girl played tennis, a faint moustache of

perspiration appeared on her upper lip. Nevertheless there was a vague

understanding that had to be tactfully broken off before I was free.

Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and

this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever

known.