1On Sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages alongshore, the world and its mistress returned to Gatsby’s house and twinkled hilariously on his lawn.
2“He’s a bootlegger,” said the young ladies, moving somewhere between his cocktails and his flowers. 3“One time he killed a man who had found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil. 4Reach me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that there crystal glass.”
5Once I wrote down on the empty spaces of a timetable the names of those who came to Gatsby’s house that summer. 6It is an old timetable now, disintegrating at its folds, and headed “This schedule in effect July 5th, 1922.” 7But I can still read the grey names, and they will give you a better impression than my generalities of those who accepted Gatsby’s hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing nothing whatever about him.
8From East Egg, then, 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. 9And the Hornbeams and the Willie Voltaires, and a whole clan named Blackbuck, who always gathered in a corner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosoever came near. 10And the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr. Chrystie’s wife), and Edgar Beaver, whose hair, they say, turned cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all.
11Clarence Endive was from East Egg, as I remember. 12He came only once, in white knickerbockers, and had a fight with a bum named Etty in the garden. 13From farther out on 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. 14Snell was there three days before he went to the penitentiary, so drunk out on the gravel drive that Mrs. Ulysses Swett’s automobile ran over his right hand. 15The 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 girls.
16From 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. Schwartz (the son) and Arthur McCarty, all connected with the movies in one way or another. 17And the Catlips and the Bembergs and G. Earl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon who afterward strangled his wife. 18Da Fontano the promoter came there, and Ed Legros and James B. (“Rot-Gut”) Ferret and the De Jongs and Ernest Lilly—they came to gamble, and when Ferret wandered into the garden it meant he was cleaned out and Associated Traction would have to fluctuate profitably next day.
19A man named Klipspringer was there so often that he became known as “the boarder”—I doubt if he had any other home. 20Of theatrical people there were Gus Waize and Horace O’Donavan and Lester Myer and George Duckweed and Francis Bull. 21Also 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.
22Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls. 23They were never quite the same ones in physical person, but they were so identical one with another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before. 24I have forgotten their names—Jaqueline, I think, or else Consuela, or Gloria or Judy or June, and their last names were either the melodious names of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American capitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to be.
25In addition to all these I can remember that Faustina O’Brien came there at least once and the Baedeker girls and young Brewer, who had his nose shot off in the war, 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 a man reputed to be her chauffeur, and a prince of something, whom we called Duke, and whose name, if I ever knew it, I have forgotten.
26All these people came to Gatsby’s house in the summer.
27At nine o’clock, one morning late in July, Gatsby’s gorgeous car lurched up the rocky drive to my door and gave out a burst of melody from its three-noted horn.
28It 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.
29“Good morning, old sport. 30You’re having lunch with me today 31and I thought we’d ride up together.”
32He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American—that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work in youth and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games. 33This quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape of restlessness. 34He was never quite still; there was always a tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand.
35He saw me looking with admiration at his car.
36“It’s pretty, isn’t it, old sport?” 37He jumped off to give me a better view. 38“Haven’t you ever seen it before?”
39I’d seen it. 40Everybody had seen it. 41It was a rich cream colour, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hatboxes and supper-boxes and toolboxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns. 42Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory, we started to town.
43I had talked with him perhaps half a dozen times in the past month and found, to my disappointment, that he had little to say. 44So my first impression, that he was a person of some undefined consequence, had gradually faded and he had become simply the proprietor of an elaborate roadhouse next door.
45And then came that disconcerting ride. 46We hadn’t reached West Egg village before Gatsby began leaving his elegant sentences unfinished and slapping himself indecisively on the knee of his caramel-coloured suit.
47“Look here, old sport,” he broke out surprisingly, “what’s your opinion of me, anyhow?”
48A little overwhelmed, I began the generalized evasions which that question deserves.
49“Well, I’m going to tell you something about my life,” he interrupted. 50“I don’t want you to get a wrong idea of me from all these stories you hear.”
51So he was aware of the bizarre accusations that flavoured conversation in his halls.
52“I’ll tell you God’s truth.” 53His right hand suddenly ordered divine retribution to stand by. 54“I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West—all dead now. 55I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. 56It is a family tradition.”
57He looked at me sideways—and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was lying. 58He hurried the phrase “educated at Oxford,” or swallowed it, or choked on it, as though it had bothered him before. 59And with this doubt, his whole statement fell to pieces, and I wondered if there wasn’t something a little sinister about him, after all.
60“What part of the Middle West?” 61I inquired casually.
62“San Francisco.”
63“I see.”
64“My family all died and I came into a good deal of money.”
65His voice was solemn, as if the memory of that sudden extinction of a clan still haunted him. 66For a moment I suspected that he was pulling my leg, but a glance at him convinced me otherwise.
67“After that I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe—Paris, Venice, Rome—collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting big game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago.”
68With an effort I managed to restrain my incredulous laughter. 69The very phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that of a turbaned “character” leaking sawdust at every pore as he pursued a tiger through the Bois de Boulogne.
70“Then came the war, old sport. 71It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life. 72I accepted a commission as first lieutenant when it began. 73In the Argonne Forest I took the remains of my machine-gun battalion so far forward that there was a half mile gap on either side of us where the infantry couldn’t advance. 74We stayed there two days and two nights, a hundred and thirty men with sixteen Lewis guns, and when the infantry came up at last they found the insignia of three German divisions among the piles of dead. 75I was promoted to be a major, and every Allied government gave me a decoration—even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!”
76Little Montenegro! 77He lifted up the words and nodded at them—with his smile. 78The smile comprehended Montenegro’s troubled history and sympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. 79It appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances which had elicited this tribute from Montenegro’s warm little heart. 80My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.
81He reached in his pocket, and a piece of metal, slung on a ribbon, fell into my palm.
82“That’s the one from Montenegro.”
83To my astonishment, the thing had an authentic look. 84“Orderi di Danilo,” ran the circular legend, “Montenegro, Nicolas Rex.”
85“Turn it.”
86“Major Jay Gatsby,” I read, “For Valour Extraordinary.”
87“Here’s another thing I always carry. 88A souvenir of Oxford days. 89It was taken in Trinity Quad—the man on my left is now the Earl of Doncaster.”
90It was a photograph of half a dozen young men in blazers loafing in an archway through which were visible a host of spires. 91There was Gatsby, looking a little, not much, younger—with a cricket bat in his hand.
92Then it was all true. 93I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace on the Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart.
94“I’m going to make a big request of you today,” he said, pocketing his souvenirs with satisfaction, “so I thought you ought to know something about me. 95I didn’t want you to think I was just some nobody. 96You see, I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.” 97He hesitated. 98“You’ll hear about it this afternoon.”
99“At lunch?”
100“No, this afternoon. 101I happened to find out that you’re taking Miss Baker to tea.”
102“Do you mean you’re in love with Miss Baker?”
103“No, old sport, I’m not. 104But Miss Baker has kindly consented to speak to you about this matter.”
105I hadn’t the faintest idea what “this matter” was, but I was more annoyed than interested. 106I hadn’t asked Jordan to tea in order to discuss Mr. Jay Gatsby. 107I was sure the request would be something utterly fantastic, and for a moment I was sorry I’d ever set foot upon his overpopulated lawn.
108He wouldn’t say another word. 109His correctness grew on him as we neared the city. 110We passed Port Roosevelt, where there was a glimpse of red-belted oceangoing ships, and sped along a cobbled slum lined with the dark, undeserted saloons of the faded-gilt nineteen-hundreds. 111Then the valley of ashes opened out on both sides of us, and I had a glimpse of Mrs. Wilson straining at the garage pump with panting vitality as we went by.
112With fenders spread like wings we scattered light through half Astoria—only half, for as we twisted among the pillars of the elevated I heard the familiar “jug-jug-spat!” 113of a motorcycle, and a frantic policeman rode alongside.
114“All right, old sport,” called Gatsby. 115We slowed down. 116Taking a white card from his wallet, he waved it before the man’s eyes.
117“Right you are,” agreed the policeman, tipping his cap. 118“Know you next time, Mr. Gatsby. 119Excuse me!”
120“What was that?” 121I inquired. 122“The picture of Oxford?”
123“I was able to do the commissioner a favour once, and he sends me a Christmas card every year.”
124Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of nonolfactory money. 125The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.
126A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two carriages with drawn blinds, and by more cheerful carriages for friends. 127The friends looked out at us with the tragic eyes and short upper lips of southeastern Europe, and I was glad that the sight of Gatsby’s splendid car was included in their sombre holiday. 128As we crossed Blackwell’s Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl. 129I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.
130“Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge,” I thought; “anything at all…”
131Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.
132Roaring noon. 133In a well-fanned Forty-second Street cellar I met Gatsby for lunch. 134Blinking away the brightness of the street outside, my eyes picked him out obscurely in the anteroom, talking to another man.
135“Mr. Carraway, this is my friend Mr. Wolfshiem.”
136A small, flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril. 137After a moment I discovered his tiny eyes in the half-darkness.
138“—So I took one look at him,” said Mr. Wolfshiem, shaking my hand earnestly, “and what do you think I did?”
139“What?” 140I inquired politely.
141But evidently he was not addressing me, for he dropped my hand and covered Gatsby with his expressive nose.
142“I handed the money to Katspaugh and I said: ‘All right, Katspaugh, don’t pay him a penny till he shuts his mouth.’ 143He shut it then and there.”
144Gatsby took an arm of each of us and moved forward into the restaurant, whereupon Mr. Wolfshiem swallowed a new sentence he was starting and lapsed into a somnambulatory abstraction.
145“Highballs?” asked the head waiter.
146“This is a nice restaurant here,” said Mr. Wolfshiem, looking at the presbyterian nymphs on the ceiling. 147“But I like across the street better!”
148“Yes, highballs,” agreed Gatsby, and then to Mr. Wolfshiem: “It’s too hot over there.”
149“Hot and small—yes,” said Mr. Wolfshiem, “but full of memories.”
150“What place is that?” 151I asked.
152“The old Metropole.”
153“The old Metropole,” brooded Mr. Wolfshiem gloomily. 154“Filled with faces dead and gone. 155Filled with friends gone now forever. 156I can’t forget so long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there. 157It was six of us at the table, and Rosy had eat and drunk a lot all evening. 158When it was almost morning the waiter came up to him with a funny look and says somebody wants to speak to him outside. 159‘All right,’ says Rosy, and begins to get up, and I pulled him down in his chair.
160“ ‘Let the bastards come in here if they want you, Rosy, but don’t you, so help me, move outside this room.’
161“It was four o’clock in the morning then, and if we’d of raised the blinds we’d of seen daylight.”
162“Did he go?” 163I asked innocently.
164“Sure he went.” 165Mr. Wolfshiem’s nose flashed at me indignantly. 166“He turned around in the door and says: ‘Don’t let that waiter take away my coffee!’ 167Then he went out on the sidewalk, and they shot him three times in his full belly and drove away.”
168“Four of them were electrocuted,” I said, remembering.
169“Five, with Becker.” 170His nostrils turned to me in an interested way. 171“I understand you’re looking for a business gonnegtion.”
172The juxtaposition of these two remarks was startling. 173Gatsby answered for me:
174“Oh, no,” he exclaimed, “this isn’t the man.”
175“No?” Mr. Wolfshiem seemed disappointed.
176“This is just a friend. 177I told you we’d talk about that some other time.”
178“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Wolfshiem, “I had a wrong man.”
179A succulent hash arrived, and Mr. Wolfshiem, forgetting the more sentimental atmosphere of the old Metropole, began to eat with ferocious delicacy. 180His eyes, meanwhile, roved very slowly all around the room—he completed the arc by turning to inspect the people directly behind. 181I think that, except for my presence, he would have taken one short glance beneath our own table.
182“Look here, old sport,” said Gatsby, leaning toward me, “I’m afraid I made you a little angry this morning in the car.”
183There was the smile again, but this time I held out against it.
184“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. 185Why has it all got to come through Miss Baker?”
186“Oh, it’s nothing underhand,” he assured me. 187“Miss Baker’s a great sportswoman, you know, and she’d never do anything that wasn’t all right.”
188Suddenly he looked at his watch, jumped up, and hurried from the room, leaving me with Mr. Wolfshiem at the table.
189“He has to telephone,” said Mr. Wolfshiem, following him with his eyes. 190“Fine fellow, isn’t he? 191Handsome to look at and a perfect gentleman.”
192“Yes.”
193“He’s an Oggsford man.”
194“Oh!”
195“He went to Oggsford College in England. 196You know Oggsford College?”
197“I’ve heard of it.”
198“It’s one of the most famous colleges in the world.”
199“Have you known Gatsby for a long time?” 200I inquired.
201“Several years,” he answered in a gratified way. 202“I made the pleasure of his acquaintance just after the war. 203But I knew I had discovered a man of fine breeding after I talked with him an hour. 204I said to myself: ‘There’s the kind of man you’d like to take home and introduce to your mother and sister.’ ” 205He paused. 206“I see you’re looking at my cuff buttons.”
207I hadn’t been looking at them, but I did now. 208They were composed of oddly familiar pieces of ivory.
209“Finest specimens of human molars,” he informed me.
210“Well!” 211I inspected them. 212“That’s a very interesting idea.”
213“Yeah.” 214He flipped his sleeves up under his coat. 215“Yeah, Gatsby’s very careful about women. 216He would never so much as look at a friend’s wife.”
217When the subject of this instinctive trust returned to the table and sat down Mr. Wolfshiem drank his coffee with a jerk and got to his feet.
218“I have enjoyed my lunch,” he said, “and I’m going to run off from you two young men before I outstay my welcome.”
219“Don’t hurry Meyer,” said Gatsby, without enthusiasm. 220Mr. Wolfshiem raised his hand in a sort of benediction.
221“You’re very polite, but I belong to another generation,” he announced solemnly. 222“You sit here and discuss your sports and your young ladies and your—” He supplied an imaginary noun with another wave of his hand. 223“As for me, I am fifty years old, and I won’t impose myself on you any longer.”
224As he shook hands and turned away his tragic nose was trembling. 225I wondered if I had said anything to offend him.
226“He becomes very sentimental sometimes,” explained Gatsby. 227“This is one of his sentimental days. 228He’s quite a character around New York—a denizen of Broadway.”
229“Who is he, anyhow, an actor?”
230“No.”
231“A dentist?”
232“Meyer Wolfshiem? 233No, he’s a gambler.” 234Gatsby hesitated, then added, coolly: “He’s the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919.”
235“Fixed the World’s Series?” I repeated.
236The idea staggered me. 237I remembered, of course, that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain. 238It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people—with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.
239“How did he happen to do that?” 240I asked after a minute.
241“He just saw the opportunity.”
242“Why isn’t he in jail?”
243“They can’t get him, old sport. 244He’s a smart man.”
245I insisted on paying the check. 246As the waiter brought my change I caught sight of Tom Buchanan across the crowded room.
247“Come along with me for a minute,” I said; “I’ve got to say hello to someone.”
248When he saw us Tom jumped up and took half a dozen steps in our direction.
249“Where’ve you been?” 250he demanded eagerly. 251“Daisy’s furious because you haven’t called up.”
252“This is Mr. Gatsby, Mr. Buchanan.”
253They shook hands briefly, and a strained, unfamiliar look of embarrassment came over Gatsby’s face.
254“How’ve you been, anyhow?” demanded Tom of me. 255“How’d you happen to come up this far to eat?”
256“I’ve been having lunch with Mr. Gatsby.”
257I turned toward Mr. Gatsby, but he was no longer there.
258One October day in nineteen-seventeen—
259(said Jordan Baker that afternoon, sitting up very straight on a straight chair in the tea-garden at the Plaza Hotel)
260—I was walking along from one place to another, half on the sidewalks and half on the lawns. 261I was happier on the lawns because I had on shoes from England with rubber knobs on the soles that bit into the soft ground. 262I had on a new plaid skirt also that blew a little in the wind, and whenever this happened the red, white, and blue banners in front of all the houses stretched out stiff and said tut-tut-tut-tut, in a disapproving way.
263The largest of the banners and the largest of the lawns belonged to Daisy Fay’s house. 264She was just eighteen, two years older than me, and by far the most popular of all the young girls in Louisville. 265She dressed in white, and had a little white roadster, and all day long the telephone rang in her house and excited young officers from Camp Taylor demanded the privilege of monopolizing her that night. 266“Anyways, for an hour!”
267When I came opposite her house that morning her white roadster was beside the kerb, and she was sitting in it with a lieutenant I had never seen before. 268They were so engrossed in each other that she didn’t see me until I was five feet away.
269“Hello, Jordan,” she called unexpectedly. 270“Please come here.”
271I was flattered that she wanted to speak to me, because of all the older girls I admired her most. 272She asked me if I was going to the Red Cross to make bandages. 273I was. 274Well, then, would I tell them that she couldn’t come that day? 275The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since. 276His name was Jay Gatsby, and I didn’t lay eyes on him again for over four years—even after I’d met him on Long Island I didn’t realize it was the same man.
277That was nineteen-seventeen. 278By the next year I had a few beaux myself, and I began to play in tournaments, so I didn’t see Daisy very often. 279She went with a slightly older crowd—when she went with anyone at all. 280Wild rumours were circulating about her—how her mother had found her packing her bag one winter night to go to New York and say goodbye to a soldier who was going overseas. 281She was effectually prevented, but she wasn’t on speaking terms with her family for several weeks. 282After that she didn’t play around with the soldiers any more, but only with a few flat-footed, shortsighted young men in town, who couldn’t get into the army at all.
283By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever. 284She had a début after the armistice, and in February she was presumably engaged to a man from New Orleans. 285In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago, with more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before. 286He came down with a hundred people in four private cars, and hired a whole floor of the Muhlbach Hotel, and the day before the wedding he gave her a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
287I was a bridesmaid. 288I came into her room half an hour before the bridal dinner, and found her lying on her bed as lovely as the June night in her flowered dress—and as drunk as a monkey. 289She had a bottle of Sauterne in one hand and a letter in the other.
290“ ’Gratulate me,” she muttered. 291“Never had a drink before, but oh how I do enjoy it.”
292“What’s the matter, Daisy?”
293I was scared, I can tell you; I’d never seen a girl like that before.
294“Here, dearies.” 295She groped around in a wastebasket she had with her on the bed and pulled out the string of pearls. 296“Take ’em downstairs and give ’em back to whoever they belong to. 297Tell ’em all Daisy’s change’ her mine. 298Say: ‘Daisy’s change’ her mine!’ ”
299She began to cry—she cried and cried. 300I rushed out and found her mother’s maid, and we locked the door and got her into a cold bath. 301She wouldn’t let go of the letter. 302She took it into the tub with her and squeezed it up in a wet ball, and only let me leave it in the soap-dish when she saw that it was coming to pieces like snow.
303But she didn’t say another word. 304We gave her spirits of ammonia and put ice on her forehead and hooked her back into her dress, and half an hour later, when we walked out of the room, the pearls were around her neck and the incident was over. 305Next day at five o’clock she married Tom Buchanan without so much as a shiver, and started off on a three months’ trip to the South Seas.
306I saw them in Santa Barbara when they came back, and I thought I’d never seen a girl so mad about her husband. 307If he left the room for a minute she’d look around uneasily, and say: “Where’s Tom gone?” and wear the most abstracted expression until she saw him coming in the door. 308She used to sit on the sand with his head in her lap by the hour, rubbing her fingers over his eyes and looking at him with unfathomable delight. 309It was touching to see them together—it made you laugh in a hushed, fascinated way. 310That was in August. 311A week after I left Santa Barbara Tom ran into a wagon on the Ventura road one night, and ripped a front wheel off his car. 312The 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.
313The next April Daisy had her little girl, and they went to France for a year. 314I saw them one spring in Cannes, and later in Deauville, and then they came back to Chicago to settle down. 315Daisy was popular in Chicago, as you know. 316They moved with a fast crowd, all of them young and rich and wild, but she came out with an absolutely perfect reputation. 317Perhaps because she doesn’t drink. 318It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. 319You can hold your tongue and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care. 320Perhaps Daisy never went in for amour at all—and yet there’s something in that voice of hers…
321Well, about six weeks ago, she heard the name Gatsby for the first time in years. 322It was when I asked you—do you remember?—if you knew Gatsby in West Egg. 323After you had gone home she came into my room and woke me up, and said: “What Gatsby?” 324and when I described him—I was half asleep—she said in the strangest voice that it must be the man she used to know. 325It wasn’t until then that I connected this Gatsby with the officer in her white car.
326When Jordan Baker had finished telling all this we had left the Plaza for half an hour and were driving in a victoria through Central Park. 327The sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in the West Fifties, and the clear voices of children, already gathered like crickets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight:
328“I’m the Sheik of Araby.329Your love belongs to me.330At night when you’re asleep Into your tent I’ll creep—”
335“It was a strange coincidence,” I said.
336“But it wasn’t a coincidence at all.”
337“Why not?”
338“Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay.”
339Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. 340He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour.
341“He wants to know,” continued Jordan, “if you’ll invite Daisy to your house some afternoon and then let him come over.”
342The modesty of the demand shook me. 343He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths—so that he could “come over” some afternoon to a stranger’s garden.
344“Did I have to know all this before he could ask such a little thing?”
345“He’s afraid, he’s waited so long. 346He thought you might be offended. 347You see, he’s regular tough underneath it all.”
348Something worried me.
349“Why didn’t he ask you to arrange a meeting?”
350“He wants her to see his house,” she explained. 351“And your house is right next door.”
352“Oh!”
353“I think he half expected her to wander into one of his parties, some night,” went on Jordan, “but she never did. 354Then he began asking people casually if they knew her, and I was the first one he found. 355It was that night he sent for me at his dance, and you should have heard the elaborate way he worked up to it. 356Of course, I immediately suggested a luncheon in New York—and I thought he’d go mad:
357“ ‘I don’t want to do anything out of the way!’ 358he kept saying. 359‘I want to see her right next door.’
360“When I said you were a particular friend of Tom’s, he started to abandon the whole idea. 361He doesn’t know very much about Tom, though he says he’s read a Chicago paper for years just on the chance of catching a glimpse of Daisy’s name.”
362It was dark now, and as we dipped under a little bridge I put my arm around Jordan’s golden shoulder and drew her toward me and asked her to dinner. 363Suddenly I wasn’t thinking of Daisy and Gatsby any more, but of this clean, hard, limited person, who dealt in universal scepticism, and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. 364A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.”
365“And Daisy ought to have something in her life,” murmured Jordan to me.
366“Does she want to see Gatsby?”
367“She’s not to know about it. 368Gatsby doesn’t want her to know. 369You’re just supposed to invite her to tea.”
370We passed a barrier of dark trees, and then the façade of Fifty-Ninth Street, a block of delicate pale light, beamed down into the park. 371Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs, and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. 372Her wan, scornful mouth smiled, and so I drew her up again closer, this time to my face.