1There was music from my neighbour’s house through the summer nights. 2In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. 3At 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. 4On 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. 5And 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.
6Every 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. 7There 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.
8At 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. 9On 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. 10In 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.
11By 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. 12The 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. 13The 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.
14The 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. 15Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. 16The 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.
17Suddenly 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. 18A 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. 19The party has begun.
20I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. 21People were not invited—they went there. 22They got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island, and somehow they ended up at Gatsby’s door. 23Once 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. 24Sometimes 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.
25I had been actually invited. 26A 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. 27He 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.
28Dressed 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. 29I 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. 30I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or insurance or automobiles. 31They 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.
32As 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.
33I 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.
34Welcome or not, I found it necessary to attach myself to someone before I should begin to address cordial remarks to the passersby.
35“Hello!” 36I roared, advancing toward her. 37My voice seemed unnaturally loud across the garden.
38“I thought you might be here,” she responded absently as I came up. 39“I remembered you lived next door to—”
40She 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.
41“Hello!” 42they cried together. 43“Sorry you didn’t win.”
44That was for the golf tournament. 45She had lost in the finals the week before.
46“You don’t know who we are,” said one of the girls in yellow, “but we met you here about a month ago.”
47“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. 48With Jordan’s slender golden arm resting in mine, we descended the steps and sauntered about the garden. 49A 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.
50“Do you come to these parties often?” inquired Jordan of the girl beside her.
51“The last one was the one I met you at,” answered the girl, in an alert confident voice. 52She turned to her companion: “Wasn’t it for you, Lucille?”
53It was for Lucille, too.
54“I like to come,” Lucille said. 55“I never care what I do, so I always have a good time. 56When 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.”
57“Did you keep it?” asked Jordan.
58“Sure I did. 59I was going to wear it tonight, but it was too big in the bust and had to be altered. 60It was gas blue with lavender beads. 61Two hundred and sixty-five dollars.”
62“There’s something funny about a fellow that’ll do a thing like that,” said the other girl eagerly. 63“He doesn’t want any trouble with anybody.”
64“Who doesn’t?” 65I inquired.
66“Gatsby. 67Somebody told me—”
68The two girls and Jordan leaned together confidentially.
69“Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.”
70A thrill passed over all of us. 71The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and listened eagerly.
72“I don’t think it’s so much that,” argued Lucille sceptically; “It’s more that he was a German spy during the war.”
73One of the men nodded in confirmation.
74“I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in Germany,” he assured us positively.
75“Oh, no,” said the first girl, “it couldn’t be that, because he was in the American army during the war.” 76As our credulity switched back to her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. 77“You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. 78I’ll bet he killed a man.”
79She narrowed her eyes and shivered. 80Lucille shivered. 81We all turned and looked around for Gatsby. 82It 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.
83The 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. 84There 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. 85Instead 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.
86“Let’s get out,” whispered Jordan, after a somehow wasteful and inappropriate half-hour; “this is much too polite for me.”
87We 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. 88The undergraduate nodded in a cynical, melancholy way.
89The bar, where we glanced first, was crowded, but Gatsby was not there. 90She couldn’t find him from the top of the steps, and he wasn’t on the veranda. 91On 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.
92A 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. 93As we entered he wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot.
94“What do you think?” 95he demanded impetuously.
96“About what?”
97He waved his hand toward the bookshelves.
98“About that. 99As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. 100I ascertained. 101They’re real.”
102“The books?”
103He nodded.
104“Absolutely real—have pages and everything. 105I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. 106Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. 107Pages and—Here! 108Lemme show you.”
109Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned with Volume One of the Stoddard Lectures.
110“See!” 111he cried triumphantly. 112“It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. 113It fooled me. 114This fella’s a regular Belasco. 115It’s a triumph. 116What thoroughness! 117What realism! 118Knew when to stop, too—didn’t cut the pages. 119But what do you want? 120What do you expect?”
121He 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.
122“Who brought you?” 123he demanded. 124“Or did you just come? 125I was brought. 126Most people were brought.”
127Jordan looked at him alertly, cheerfully, without answering.
128“I was brought by a woman named Roosevelt,” he continued. 129“Mrs. Claud Roosevelt. 130Do you know her? 131I met her somewhere last night. 132I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.”
133“Has it?”
134“A little bit, I think. 135I can’t tell yet. 136I’ve only been here an hour. 137Did I tell you about the books? 138They’re real. 139They’re—”
140“You told us.”
141We shook hands with him gravely and went back outdoors.
142There 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. 143By midnight the hilarity had increased. 144A 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. 145A 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. 146The 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.
147I was still with Jordan Baker. 148We 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. 149I was enjoying myself now. 150I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound.
151At a lull in the entertainment the man looked at me and smiled.
152“Your face is familiar,” he said politely. 153“Weren’t you in the First Division during the war?”
154“Why yes. 155I was in the Twenty-eighth Infantry.”
156“I was in the Sixteenth until June nineteen-eighteen. 157I knew I’d seen you somewhere before.”
158We talked for a moment about some wet, grey little villages in France. 159Evidently 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.
160“Want to go with me, old sport? 161Just near the shore along the Sound.”
162“What time?”
163“Any time that suits you best.”
164It was on the tip of my tongue to ask his name when Jordan looked around and smiled.
165“Having a gay time now?” she inquired.
166“Much better.” 167I turned again to my new acquaintance. 168“This is an unusual party for me. 169I haven’t even seen the host. 170I 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.”
171For a moment he looked at me as if he failed to understand.
172“I’m Gatsby,” he said suddenly.
173“What!” 174I exclaimed. 175“Oh, I beg your pardon.”
176“I thought you knew, old sport. 177I’m afraid I’m not a very good host.”
178He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. 179It 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. 180It faced—or seemed to face—the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. 181It 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. 182Precisely 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. 183Some time before he introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.
184Almost at the moment when Mr. Gatsby identified himself a butler hurried toward him with the information that Chicago was calling him on the wire. 185He excused himself with a small bow that included each of us in turn.
186“If you want anything just ask for it, old sport,” he urged me. 187“Excuse me. 188I will rejoin you later.”
189When he was gone I turned immediately to Jordan—constrained to assure her of my surprise. 190I had expected that Mr. Gatsby would be a florid and corpulent person in his middle years.
191“Who is he?” 192I demanded. 193“Do you know?”
194“He’s just a man named Gatsby.”
195“Where is he from, I mean? 196And what does he do?”
197“Now you’re started on the subject,” she answered with a wan smile. 198“Well, he told me once he was an Oxford man.”
199A dim background started to take shape behind him, but at her next remark it faded away.
200“However, I don’t believe it.”
201“Why not?”
202“I don’t know,” she insisted, “I just don’t think he went there.”
203Something in her tone reminded me of the other girl’s “I think he killed a man,” and had the effect of stimulating my curiosity. 204I would have accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York. 205That was comprehensible. 206But 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.
207“Anyhow, he gives large parties,” said Jordan, changing the subject with an urban distaste for the concrete. 208“And I like large parties. 209They’re so intimate. 210At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”
211There was the boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the orchestra leader rang out suddenly above the echolalia of the garden.
212“Ladies and gentlemen,” he cried. 213“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. 214If you read the papers you know there was a big sensation.” 215He smiled with jovial condescension, and added: “Some sensation!” 216Whereupon everybody laughed.
217“The piece is known,” he concluded lustily, “as ‘Vladmir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World!’ ”
218The 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. 219His tanned skin was drawn attractively tight on his face and his short hair looked as though it were trimmed every day. 220I could see nothing sinister about him. 221I 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. 222When 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.
223“I beg your pardon.”
224Gatsby’s butler was suddenly standing beside us.
225“Miss Baker?” he inquired. 226“I beg your pardon, but Mr. Gatsby would like to speak to you alone.”
227“With me?” 228she exclaimed in surprise.
229“Yes, madame.”
230She got up slowly, raising her eyebrows at me in astonishment, and followed the butler toward the house. 231I 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.
232I was alone and it was almost two. 233For some time confused and intriguing sounds had issued from a long, many-windowed room which overhung the terrace. 234Eluding 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.
235The large room was full of people. 236One 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. 237She 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. 238Whenever 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. 239The 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. 240A 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.
241“She had a fight with a man who says he’s her husband,” explained a girl at my elbow.
242I looked around. 243Most of the remaining women were now having fights with men said to be their husbands. 244Even Jordan’s party, the quartet from East Egg, were rent asunder by dissension. 245One 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!” 246into his ear.
247The reluctance to go home was not confined to wayward men. 248The hall was at present occupied by two deplorably sober men and their highly indignant wives. 249The wives were sympathizing with each other in slightly raised voices.
250“Whenever he sees I’m having a good time he wants to go home.”
251“Never heard anything so selfish in my life.”
252“We’re always the first ones to leave.”
253“So are we.”
254“Well, we’re almost the last tonight,” said one of the men sheepishly. 255“The orchestra left half an hour ago.”
256In 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.
257As I waited for my hat in the hall the door of the library opened and Jordan Baker and Gatsby came out together. 258He 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.
259Jordan’s party were calling impatiently to her from the porch, but she lingered for a moment to shake hands.
260“I’ve just heard the most amazing thing,” she whispered. 261“How long were we in there?”
262“Why, about an hour.”
263“It was… simply amazing,” she repeated abstractedly. 264“But I swore I wouldn’t tell it and here I am tantalizing you.” 265She yawned gracefully in my face. 266“Please come and see me… Phone book… Under the name of Mrs. Sigourney Howard… My aunt…” 267She was hurrying off as she talked—her brown hand waved a jaunty salute as she melted into her party at the door.
268Rather ashamed that on my first appearance I had stayed so late, I joined the last of Gatsby’s guests, who were clustered around him. 269I wanted to explain that I’d hunted for him early in the evening and to apologize for not having known him in the garden.
270“Don’t mention it,” he enjoined me eagerly. 271“Don’t give it another thought, old sport.” 272The familiar expression held no more familiarity than the hand which reassuringly brushed my shoulder. 273“And don’t forget we’re going up in the hydroplane tomorrow morning, at nine o’clock.”
274Then the butler, behind his shoulder:
275“Philadelphia wants you on the phone, sir.”
276“All right, in a minute. 277Tell them I’ll be right there… Good night.”
278“Good night.”
279“Good night.” 280He 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. 281“Good night, old sport… Good night.”
282But as I walked down the steps I saw that the evening was not quite over. 283Fifty feet from the door a dozen headlights illuminated a bizarre and tumultuous scene. 284In 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. 285The sharp jut of a wall accounted for the detachment of the wheel, which was now getting considerable attention from half a dozen curious chauffeurs. 286However, 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.
287A 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.
288“See!” 289he explained. 290“It went in the ditch.”
291The 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.
292“How’d it happen?”
293He shrugged his shoulders.
294“I know nothing whatever about mechanics,” he said decisively.
295“But how did it happen? 296Did you run into the wall?”
297“Don’t ask me,” said Owl Eyes, washing his hands of the whole matter. 298“I know very little about driving—next to nothing. 299It happened, and that’s all I know.”
300“Well, if you’re a poor driver you oughtn’t to try driving at night.”
301“But I wasn’t even trying,” he explained indignantly, “I wasn’t even trying.”
302An awed hush fell upon the bystanders.
303“Do you want to commit suicide?”
304“You’re lucky it was just a wheel! 305A bad driver and not even trying!”
306“You don’t understand,” explained the criminal. 307“I wasn’t driving. 308There’s another man in the car.”
309The shock that followed this declaration found voice in a sustained “Ah-h-h!” 310as the door of the coupé swung slowly open. 311The crowd—it was now a crowd—stepped back involuntarily, and when the door had opened wide there was a ghostly pause. 312Then, 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.
313Blinded 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.
314“Wha’s matter?” 315he inquired calmly. 316“Did we run outa gas?”
317“Look!”
318Half 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.
319“It came off,” someone explained.
320He nodded.
321“At first I din’ notice we’d stopped.”
322A pause. 323Then, taking a long breath and straightening his shoulders, he remarked in a determined voice:
324“Wonder’ff tell me where there’s a gas’line station?”
325At 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.
326“Back out,” he suggested after a moment. 327“Put her in reverse.”
328“But the wheel’s off!”
329He hesitated.
330“No harm in trying,” he said.
331The caterwauling horns had reached a crescendo and I turned away and cut across the lawn toward home. 332I glanced back once. 333A 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. 334A 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.
335Reading 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. 336On the contrary, they were merely casual events in a crowded summer, and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less than my personal affairs.
337Most of the time I worked. 338In the early morning the sun threw my shadow westward as I hurried down the white chasms of lower New York to the Probity Trust. 339I 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. 340I 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.
341I 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. 342There were generally a few rioters around, but they never came into the library, so it was a good place to work. 343After 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.
344I 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. 345I 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. 346Sometimes, 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. 347At 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.
348Again 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. 349Forms 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. 350Imagining that I, too, was hurrying towards gaiety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well.
351For a while I lost sight of Jordan Baker, and then in midsummer I found her again. 352At first I was flattered to go places with her, because she was a golf champion, and everyone knew her name. 353Then it was something more. 354I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity. 355The 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. 356When 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. 357At 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. 358The thing approached the proportions of a scandal—then died away. 359A caddy retracted his statement, and the only other witness admitted that he might have been mistaken. 360The incident and the name had remained together in my mind.
361Jordan 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. 362She was incurably dishonest. 363She 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.
364It made no difference to me. 365Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply—I was casually sorry, and then I forgot. 366It was on that same house-party that we had a curious conversation about driving a car. 367It started because she passed so close to some workmen that our fender flicked a button on one man’s coat.
368“You’re a rotten driver,” I protested. 369“Either you ought to be more careful, or you oughtn’t to drive at all.”
370“I am careful.”
371“No, you’re not.”
372“Well, other people are,” she said lightly.
373“What’s that got to do with it?”
374“They’ll keep out of my way,” she insisted. 375“It takes two to make an accident.”
376“Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.”
377“I hope I never will,” she answered. 378“I hate careless people. 379That’s why I like you.”
380Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. 381But 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. 382I’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. 383Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that had to be tactfully broken off before I was free.
384Everyone 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.