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 to each of us.

“If you want anything just ask for it, old sport,” he told me. “Excuse me. I will rejoin you later.”

When he was gone I turned immediately to Jordan to assure her of my surprise. I had expected that Mr. Gatsby would be a florid and corpulent person in his middle years⁷².

“Who is he?” I asked. “Do you know?”

“He’s just a man named Gatsby.”

“Where is he from, I mean? And what does he do?” “Well, he told me once he was an Oxford man. However, I don’t believe it.”

“Why not?”

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

Something in her tone reminded me of the other girl’s “I think he killed a man,” and had the effect of stimulating my curiosity. Young men didn’t – at least in my provincial inexperience I believed they didn’t – appear coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island.

“Anyhow, he gives large parties,” said Jordan, changing the subject. “And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”

The voice of the orchestra leader rang out suddenly above the garden.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he cried. “At the request of Mr. Gatsby we are going to play for you Mr. Vladimir Tostoff⁷³’s latest work, which attracted so much attention at Carnegie Hall⁷⁴ last May. If you read the papers, you know there was a big sensation. The piece is known as Vladimir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World. ”

Just as the composition 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 was cut every day. I could see nothing sinister about him. When the Jazz History of the World was over, girls were putting their heads on men’s shoulders in a puppyish way – but no one looked at Gatsby.

“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 was surprised.

“Yes, madam.”

She got up slowly, raising her eyebrows at me, and followed the butler toward the house. I was alone and it was almost two. For some time intriguing sounds could be heard from a long, many-windowed room; I went inside.

The large room was full of people. One of the girls in yellow was playing the piano, and a tall, red-haired young lady from a famous chorus stood beside her. She was singing. She had drunk a lot of champagne, and during the song she had decided that everything was very, very sad – she was not only singing, she was crying too. The tears streamed down her cheeks. Then she threw up her hands, sank into a chair, and went off into a deep sleep.

“She had a fight with a man who says he’s her husband,” explained a girl 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 quarreling. One of the men was talking with curious intensity to a young actress, and his wife, after trying to laugh at the situation in an indifferent way, broke down and every five minutes appeared suddenly at his side like and hissed: “You promised!” into his ear.

The reluctance to go home was not confined to wayward men.⁷⁵ Two sober men and their highly indignant wives were quarreling in the hall. 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.”

The dispute ended in a short struggle, and both wives were lifted, kicking, into the night.⁷⁶

As I waited for my hat in the hall the door of the library opened and Jordan Baker and Gatsby came out together. Jordan’s party were calling impatiently to her from the porch, but she stopped 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. 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 goodbye as she went outside.

Rather ashamed that on my first appearance I had stayed so late, I joined the last of Gatsby’s guests, who crowded around him. I wanted to apologize for not having known him in the garden.

“Don’t mention it,” he told me eagerly. “Don’t give it another thought, old sport. 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, 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 illuminated⁷⁷ a strange scene. In the ditch beside the road there was a new coupe⁷⁸ without one wheel. The sharp jut of a wall was to blame for the separation of the wheel, which was now getting attention from half a dozen curious chauffeurs. However, as they had left their cars blocking the road, the beeps of other cars added to the confusion of the scene.

A man stood in the middle of the road, looking from the car to the tire and from the tire to the observers in a pleasant, puzzled way.

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

He was so surprised, that I recognized the man – it was the late customer of Gatsby’s library.

“How did it happen?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

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

“But how did it happen? Did you run into the wall?” “Don’t ask me,” said Owl Eyes. “I know very little about driving – next to nothing. It happened, and that’s all I know. I wasn’t driving. There’s another man in the car.”

The door of the coupe opened slowly. 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 individual stepped out.

“Wha’s matter?” he inquired calmly. “Did we run out of gas?⁷⁹”

“Look!”

Half a dozen fingers pointed at the amputated wheel – he stared at it for a moment. A pause. Then he remarked in a determined voice:

“Wonder’ff tell me where there’s a gas’line station?⁸⁰” At least a dozen men explained to him that wheel and car were no longer joined.

The beeping had reached its culmination and I turned away toward home. I glanced back once. The night was fine as before, but a sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, giving the impression of complete loneliness to 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 it seems that the events of three nights 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 affairs⁸¹.

Most of the time I worked. In the early morning I hurried down the streets of lower New York. 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 worked in the accounting department, but her brother began throwing mean looks in my direction, so I broke up with her.

I began to like New York, the 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. At the city twilight I felt loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others – poor young clerks, wasting the best moments of night and life.

For a while I lost sight of Jordan Baker, and then in midsummer I found her again. At first I liked 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 and one day I found what it was. When we were on a house party, she left a borrowed car out in the rain with the top down⁸², and then lied about it – and suddenly I remembered the story about her that had come to my mind that night at Daisy’s. At her first big golf tournament there was a scandal that nearly reached the newspapers – a suggestion that she had moved her ball from a bad position in the semifinal round. 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 in a company where no one would think that it’s possible to break the rules. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage and I suppose she had begun doing her tricks when she was very young. So she managed to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard young 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 workman that our fender flicked a button⁸³ on one man’s coat.

“You’re a bad 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. “They’ll keep out of my way.”

“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 gray, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately changed 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 out of that story back home. I understood that I had to break up with that girl tactfully before I was free.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal goodness, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

Exercises

1. Read the chapter and answer if these statements are true, false or there is no information in the text.

1. Gatsby’s guests liked spending time on his beach.

2. Gatsby personally invited all his guests.

3. Jordan had a yellow dress on.

4. Jordan lost the last golf tournament.

5. When one of the guests tore her dress at a Gatsby’s party he sent her a new one, but it was very cheap.

6. There were only imitations of books in Gatsby’s library.

7. Nick understood immediately that the man sitting at his table was Gatsby himself.

8. Nick and Gatsby were in the same division during the War.

9. Gatsby wanted to speak with Jordan in private about her plans for future.

10. After the party a car lost one wheel and blocked the driveway.

11. Jordan Baker was a dishonest person.

12. Jordan liked fast driving.

2. Practice the pronunciation of these words.