The Great Gatsby 4

 

THE GREAT GATSBY

 

PART 4

 

 

Chapter 4

On Sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages along shore

the world and its mistress returned to Gatsby's house and twinkled

hilariously on his lawn.

"He's a bootlegger," said the young ladies, moving somewhere between

his cocktails and his flowers. "One time he killed a man who had found out

that he was nephew to von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil.

Reach me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that there crystal

glass."

Once I wrote down on the empty spaces of a time-table the names

of those who came to Gatsby's house that summer. It is an old time-table

now, disintegrating at its folds and headed "This schedule in effect

July 5th, 1922." But 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.

From 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. And 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.

And 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.

Clarence Endive was from East Egg, as I remember. He came only

once, in white knickerbockers, and had a fight with a bum named

Etty in the garden. From 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. Snell 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. The 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.

From 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. Schwartze (the son) and Arthur McCarty, all connected with the

movies in one way or another. And the Catlips and the Bembergs and G.

Earl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon who afterward strangled his wife.

Da 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.

A man named Klipspringer was there so often and so long that he became

known as "the boarder"--I doubt if he had any other home. Of theatrical

people there were Gus Waize and Horace O'Donavan and Lester Meyer and

George Duckweed and Francis Bull. Also 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.

Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls. They 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. I 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.

In 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.

All these people came to Gatsby's house in the summer.

At 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. It 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.

"Good morning, old sport. You're having lunch with me today and I

thought we'd ride up together."

He 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 or rigid sitting in youth

and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games.

This quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in

the shape of restlessness. He was never quite still; there was always a

tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand.

He saw me looking with admiration at his car.

"It's pretty, isn't it, old sport." He jumped off to give me a better

view. "Haven't you ever seen it before?"

I'd seen it. Everybody had seen it. It was a rich cream color, bright

with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with

triumphant hatboxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a

labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down behind

many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory we started

to town.

I had talked with him perhaps half a dozen times in the past month and

found, to my disappointment, that he had little to say. So 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.

And then came that disconcerting ride. We hadn't reached West Egg

village before Gatsby began leaving his elegant sentences unfinished

and slapping himself indecisively on the knee of his caramel-colored

suit.

"Look here, old sport," he broke out surprisingly. "What's your opinion

of me, anyhow?"

A little overwhelmed, I began the generalized evasions which

that question deserves.

"Well, I'm going to tell you something about my life," he interrupted.

"I don't want you to get a wrong idea of me from all these stories you

hear."

So he was aware of the bizarre accusations that flavored conversation in

his halls.

"I'll tell you God's truth." His right hand suddenly ordered divine

retribution to stand by. "I am the son of some wealthy people in the

middle-west--all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at

Oxford because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years.

It is a family tradition."

He looked at me sideways--and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was

lying. He hurried the phrase "educated at Oxford," or swallowed it or

choked on it as though it had bothered him before. And with this doubt

his whole statement fell to pieces and I wondered if there wasn't

something a little sinister about him after all.

"What part of the middle-west?" I inquired casually.

"San Francisco."

"I see."

"My family all died and I came into a good deal of money."

His voice was solemn as if the memory of that sudden extinction of a clan

still haunted him. For a moment I suspected that he was pulling my leg

but a glance at him convinced me otherwise.

"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."

With an effort I managed to restrain my incredulous laughter. The 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.

"Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief and I tried very

hard to die but I seemed to bear an enchanted life. I accepted a

commission as first lieutenant when it began. In the Argonne Forest I

took two machine-gun detachments so far forward that there was a half

mile gap on either side of us where the infantry couldn't advance. We

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. I was

promoted to be a major and every Allied government gave me a

decoration--even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the Adriatic

Sea!"

Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them--with

his smile. The smile comprehended Montenegro's troubled history and

sympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. It

appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances which had

elicited this tribute from Montenegro's warm little heart. My

incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming

hastily through a dozen magazines.

He reached in his pocket and a piece of metal, slung on a ribbon, fell

into my palm.

"That's the one from Montenegro."

To my astonishment, the thing had an authentic look.

_Orderi di Danilo_, ran the circular legend, _Montenegro, Nicolas Rex_.

"Turn it."

_Major Jay Gatsby_, I read, _For Valour Extraordinary_.

"Here's another thing I always carry. A souvenir of Oxford days. It was

taken in Trinity Quad--the man on my left is now the Earl of Dorcaster."

It was a photograph of half a dozen young men in blazers loafing in an

archway through which were visible a host of spires. There was Gatsby,

looking a little, not much, younger--with a cricket bat in his hand.

Then it was all true. I 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.

"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. I didn't want you to think I was just some nobody. You see,

I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there

trying to forget the sad thing that happened to me." He hesitated.

"You'll hear about it this afternoon."

"At lunch?"

"No, this afternoon. I happened to find out that you're taking Miss Baker

to tea."

"Do you mean you're in love with Miss Baker?"

"No, old sport, I'm not. But Miss Baker has kindly consented to speak

to you about this matter."

I hadn't the faintest idea what "this matter" was, but I was more

annoyed than interested. I hadn't asked Jordan to tea in order to discuss

Mr. Jay Gatsby. I 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.

He wouldn't say another word. His correctness grew on him as we neared

the city. We passed Port Roosevelt, where there was a glimpse of

red-belted ocean-going ships, and sped along a cobbled slum lined with

the dark, undeserted saloons of the faded gilt nineteen-hundreds. Then

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.

With 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!" of a motor cycle, and a

frantic policeman rode alongside.

"All right, old sport," called Gatsby. We slowed down. Taking a white

card from his wallet he waved it before the man's eyes.

"Right you are," agreed the policeman, tipping his cap. "Know you next

time, Mr. Gatsby. Excuse ME!"

"What was that?" I inquired.  "The picture of Oxford?"

"I was able to do the commissioner a favor once, and he sends me a

Christmas card every year."

Over 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

non-olfactory money. The 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.

A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two

carriages with drawn blinds and by more cheerful carriages for

friends. The friends looked out at us with the tragic eyes and short

upper lips of south-eastern Europe, and I was glad that the sight of

Gatsby's splendid car was included in their somber holiday. As 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. I

laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in

haughty rivalry.

"Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge," I thought;

"anything at all. . . ."

Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.

Roaring noon. In a well-fanned Forty-second Street cellar I met Gatsby

for lunch. Blinking away the brightness of the street outside my eyes

picked him out obscurely in the anteroom, talking to another man.

"Mr. Carraway this is my friend Mr. Wolfshiem."

A small, flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two

fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril. After a moment I

discovered his tiny eyes in the half darkness.

"--so I took one look at him--" said Mr. Wolfshiem, shaking my hand

earnestly, "--and what do you think I did?"

"What?" I inquired politely.

But evidently he was not addressing me for he dropped my hand and

covered Gatsby with his expressive nose.

"I handed the money to Katspaugh and I sid, 'All right, Katspaugh,

don't pay him a penny till he shuts his mouth.' He shut it then and

there."

Gatsby 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.

"Highballs?" asked the head waiter.

"This is a nice restaurant here," said Mr. Wolfshiem looking at the

Presbyterian nymphs on the ceiling. "But I like across the street better!"

"Yes, highballs," agreed Gatsby, and then to Mr. Wolfshiem: "It's too hot

over there."

"Hot and small--yes," said Mr. Wolfshiem, "but full of memories."

"What place is that?" I asked.

"The old Metropole.

"The old Metropole," brooded Mr. Wolfshiem gloomily. "Filled with faces

dead and gone. Filled with friends gone now forever. I can't forget so

long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there. It was six of us

at the table and Rosy had eat and drunk a lot all evening. When it was

almost morning the waiter came up to him with a funny look and says

somebody wants to speak to him outside. 'All right,' says Rosy and begins

to get up and I pulled him down in his chair.

" 'Let the bastards come in here if they want you, Rosy, but don't you,

so help me, move outside this room.'

"It was four o'clock in the morning then, and if we'd of raised the blinds

we'd of seen daylight."

"Did he go?" I asked innocently.

"Sure he went,"--Mr. Wolfshiem's nose flashed at me indignantly--"He

turned around in the door and says, 'Don't let that waiter take away

my coffee!' Then he went out on the sidewalk and they shot him

three times in his full belly and drove away."

"Four of them were electrocuted," I said, remembering.

"Five with Becker." His nostrils turned to me in an interested way.

"I understand you're looking for a business gonnegtion."

The juxtaposition of these two remarks was startling. Gatsby answered

for me:

"Oh, no," he exclaimed, "this isn't the man!"

"No?" Mr. Wolfshiem seemed disappointed.

"This is just a friend. I told you we'd talk about that some other

time."

"I beg your pardon," said Mr. Wolfshiem, "I had a wrong man."

A succulent hash arrived, and Mr. Wolfshiem, forgetting the more

sentimental atmosphere of the old Metropole, began to eat with

ferocious delicacy. His eyes, meanwhile, roved very slowly all around the

room--he completed the arc by turning to inspect the people directly

behind. I think that, except for my presence, he would have taken one

short glance beneath our own table.

"Look here, old sport," said Gatsby, leaning toward me, "I'm afraid I

made you a little angry this morning in the car."

There was the smile again, but this time I held out against it.

"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. Why has it all got to

come through Miss Baker?"

"Oh, it's nothing underhand," he assured me. "Miss Baker's a great

sportswoman, you know, and she'd never do anything that wasn't all right."

Suddenly he looked at his watch, jumped up and hurried from the room

leaving me with Mr. Wolfshiem at the table.

"He has to telephone," said Mr. Wolfshiem, following him with his eyes.

"Fine fellow, isn't he? Handsome to look at and a perfect gentleman."

"Yes."

"He's an Oggsford man."

"Oh!"

"He went to Oggsford College in England. You know Oggsford College?"

"I've heard of it."

"It's one of the most famous colleges in the world."

"Have you known Gatsby for a long time?" I inquired.

"Several years," he answered in a gratified way. "I made the pleasure of

his acquaintance just after the war. But I knew I had discovered a man of

fine breeding after I talked with him an hour. I said to myself: 'There's

the kind of man you'd like to take home and introduce to your mother and

sister.' " He paused. "I see you're looking at my cuff buttons."

I hadn't been looking at them, but I did now.  They were composed of

oddly familiar pieces of ivory.

"Finest specimens of human molars," he informed me.

"Well!" I inspected them. "That's a very interesting idea."

"Yeah." He flipped his sleeves up under his coat. "Yeah, Gatsby's very

careful about women. He would never so much as look at a friend's wife."

When 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.

"I have enjoyed my lunch," he said, "and I'm going to run off from you

two young men before I outstay my welcome."

"Don't hurry, Meyer," said Gatsby, without enthusiasm. Mr. Wolfshiem

raised his hand in a sort of benediction.

"You're very polite but I belong to another generation," he announced

solemnly. "You sit here and discuss your sports and your young ladies and

your----" He supplied an imaginary noun with another wave of his

hand--"As for me, I am fifty years old, and I won't impose myself

on you any longer."

As he shook hands and turned away his tragic nose was trembling.

I wondered if I had said anything to offend him.

"He becomes very sentimental sometimes," explained Gatsby. "This is one of

his sentimental days. He's quite a character around New York--a denizen of

Broadway."

"Who is he anyhow--an actor?"

"No."

"A dentist?"

"Meyer Wolfshiem? No, he's a gambler." Gatsby hesitated, then added

coolly: "He's the man who fixed the World's Series back in 1919."

"Fixed the World's Series?" I repeated.

The idea staggered me. I 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. It 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.

"How did he happen to do that?" I asked after a minute.

"He just saw the opportunity."

"Why isn't he in jail?"

"They can't get him, old sport. He's a smart man."

I insisted on paying the check. As the waiter brought my change I caught

sight of Tom Buchanan across the crowded room.

"Come along with me for a minute," I said. "I've got to say hello

to someone."

When he saw us Tom jumped up and took half a dozen steps in our

direction.

"Where've you been?" he demanded eagerly. "Daisy's furious because you

haven't called up."

"This is Mr. Gatsby, Mr. Buchanan."

They shook hands briefly and a strained, unfamiliar look of embarrassment

came over Gatsby's face.

"How've you been, anyhow?" demanded Tom of me. "How'd you happen to come

up this far to eat?"

"I've been having lunch with Mr. Gatsby."

I turned toward Mr. Gatsby, but he was no longer there.

One October day in nineteen-seventeen----

(said Jordan Baker that afternoon, sitting up very straight on a straight

chair in the tea-garden at the Plaza Hotel)

--I was walking along from one place to another half on the sidewalks and

half on the lawns. I was happier on the lawns because I had on shoes from

England with rubber nobs on the soles that bit into the soft ground.

I 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.

The largest of the banners and the largest of the lawns belonged to

Daisy Fay's house. She was just eighteen, two years older than me, and

by far the most popular of all the young girls in Louisville. She

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, "anyways,

for an hour!"

When I came opposite her house that morning her white roadster was beside

the curb, and she was sitting in it with a lieutenant I had never seen

before. They were so engrossed in each other that she didn't see me until

I was five feet away.

"Hello Jordan," she called unexpectedly. "Please come here."

I was flattered that she wanted to speak to me, because of all the older

girls I admired her most. She asked me if I was going to the Red Cross and

make bandages. I was. Well, then, would I tell them that she couldn't come

that day? The 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. His 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.

That was nineteen-seventeen. By the next year I had a few beaux myself,

and I began to play in tournaments, so I didn't see Daisy very often.

She went with a slightly older crowd--when she went with anyone at all.

Wild rumors 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. She was effectually prevented, but she

wasn't on speaking terms with her family for several weeks. After

that she didn't play around with the soldiers any more but only

with a few flat-footed, short-sighted young men in town who couldn't

get into the army at all.

By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever. She had a debut

after the Armistice, and in February she was presumably engaged to a

man from New Orleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago with

more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before. He came

down with a hundred people in four private cars and hired a whole

floor of the Seelbach Hotel, and the day before the wedding he gave her

a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

I was bridesmaid. I 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. She had a bottle of

sauterne in one hand and a letter in the other.

" 'Gratulate me," she muttered. "Never had a drink before but oh, how I do

enjoy it."

"What's the matter, Daisy?"

I was scared, I can tell you; I'd never seen a girl like that before.

"Here, dearis." She groped around in a waste-basket she had with her

on the bed and pulled out the string of pearls. "Take 'em downstairs and

give 'em back to whoever they belong to. Tell 'em all Daisy's change' her

mine. Say 'Daisy's change' her mine!'."

She began to cry--she cried and cried. I rushed out and found her

mother's maid and we locked the door and got her into a cold bath. She

wouldn't let go of the letter. She took it into the tub with her and

squeezed it up into a wet ball, and only let me leave it in the

soap dish when she saw that it was coming to pieces like snow.

But she didn't say another word. We 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. Next 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.

I saw them in Santa Barbara when they came back and I thought I'd

never seen a girl so mad about her husband. If 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. She 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. It was touching to see them together--it made you laugh in a

hushed, fascinated way. That was in August. A 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. The 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.

The next April Daisy had her little girl and they went to France for a

year. I saw them one spring in Cannes and later in Deauville and then

they came back to Chicago to settle down. Daisy was popular in Chicago,

as you know. They moved with a fast crowd, all of them young and rich

and wild, but she came out with an absolutely perfect reputation.

Perhaps because she doesn't drink. It's a great advantage not to drink

among hard-drinking people. You 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. Perhaps Daisy never went in

for amour at all--and yet there's something in that voice of hers. . . .

Well, about six weeks ago, she heard the name Gatsby for the first time

in years. It was when I asked you--do you remember?--if you knew Gatsby

in West Egg. After you had gone home she came into my room and woke me

up, and said "What Gatsby?" and when I described him--I was half

asleep--she said in the strangest voice that it must be the man she used

to know. It wasn't until then that I connected this Gatsby with the

officer in her white car.

When 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.

The sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in

the West Fifties and the clear voices of girls, already gathered like

crickets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight:

    "I'm the Sheik of Araby,

    Your love belongs to me.

    At night when you're are asleep,

    Into your tent I'll creep----"

"It was a strange coincidence," I said.

"But it wasn't a coincidence at all."

"Why not?"

"Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay."

Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired

on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the

womb of his purposeless splendor.

"He wants to know--" continued Jordan "--if you'll invite Daisy to your

house some afternoon and then let him come over."

The modesty of the demand shook me. He 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.

"Did I have to know all this before he could ask such a little thing?"

"He's afraid. He's waited so long. He thought you might be offended.

You see he's a regular tough underneath it all."

Something worried me.

"Why didn't he ask you to arrange a meeting?"

"He wants her to see his house," she explained. "And your house is right

next door."

"Oh!"

"I think he half expected her to wander into one of his parties,

some night," went on Jordan, "but she never did. Then he began asking

people casually if they knew her, and I was the first one he found.

It was that night he sent for me at his dance, and you should have

heard the elaborate way he worked up to it. Of course, I immediately

suggested a luncheon in New York--and I thought he'd go mad:

" 'I don't want to do anything out of the way!' he kept saying. 'I want to

see her right next door.'

"When I said you were a particular friend of Tom's he started to abandon

the whole idea. He 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."

It 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. Suddenly I wasn't thinking of Daisy and Gatsby any more but of

this clean, hard, limited person who dealt in universal skepticism and

who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. A 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."

"And Daisy ought to have something in her life," murmured Jordan to me.

"Does she want to see Gatsby?"

"She's not to know about it. Gatsby doesn't want her to know. You're

just supposed to invite her to tea."

We passed a barrier of dark trees, and then the facade of Fifty-ninth

Street, a block of delicate pale light, beamed down into the park.

Unlike 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. Her wan, scornful mouth smiled and so

I drew her up again, closer, this time to my face.

 

         

 

To be continued

 

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