“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 eternal reassurance in it, that you may see 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.70 It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had exactly the impression of you that you hoped to make. Just at that point it disappeared – and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd71. 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 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