The Great Gatsby 3

 

THE GREAT GATSBY

 

PART 3

 

 

Chapter 3

There was music from my neighbor'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 motor-boats

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

foam. On week-ends 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 colored 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 colors and hair shorn 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 center of a group and then excited with triumph

glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color 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 behavior associated with

amusement parks. 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 honor 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 passers-by.

"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 skeptically; "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 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 gayety.

"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 book-shelves.

"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 skepticism 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 individualistically

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 Third

Division during the war?"

"Why, yes. I was in the Ninth Machine-Gun Battalion."

"I was in the Seventh Infantry 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 external world for an instant, and then

concentrated on YOU with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It

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

you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it

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

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

elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate

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

introduced himself 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 urbane 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. Vladimir 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 'Vladimir 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 some one 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 color, 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 tire and from the

tire 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," some one 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 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 Thirty-third 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 five

deep with throbbing taxi cabs, 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 outlined unintelligible gestures inside. Imagining that

I, too, was hurrying toward gayety 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 every one 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 semi-final 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 mustache of perspiration appeared on her

upper lip. Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that had to be

tactfully broken off before I was free.

Every one 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.

         

 

To be continued

 

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