“Where is he from, I mean? And what does he do?”
“Well, he told me once he was an Oxford man[39]. However, I don't believe it.”
“Why not?”
“I don't know,” she insisted, “I just don't think he went there. Anyhow he gives large parties. And I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy.”
Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever men. She was incurably dishonest[40]. But dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply. 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.
Chapter 4
On Sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages along shore everybody returned to Gatsby's house.
“He's a bootlegger[41],” 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 second cousin to the devil. Reach me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that there crystal glass.”
At nine o'clock, one morning late in July Gatsby's gorgeous car lurched up the rocky drive to my door. 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 form- less 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 said. “I don't want you to get a wrong idea of me from all these stories you hear. 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.
“San Francisco. My family all died and I came into a good deal of money[42]. After that I lived in all the capitals of Europe – Paris, Venice, Rome – collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting, painting a little.”
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.
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 was promoted to be a major[43]. Here's a thing I always carry. A souvenir of Oxford days.”
It was a photograph of young men. There was Gatsby, looking a little, not much, younger – with a cricket bat in his hand.
Then it was all true.
“I'm going to make a big request of you today,” he said, “so I thought you ought to know something about me. I didn't want you to think I was just some nobody.”
The next day I was having dinner with Jordan Baker. Suddenly she said to me, “One October day in nineteen-seventeen – Gatsby met Daisy. They loved each other, but she married Tom Buchanan. Tom was very rich. I know everything, I was bridesmaid. I came into her room half an hour before the bridal dinner, and found her lying on her bed. She had a letter in her hand. I was scared, I can tell you; I'd never seen a girl like that before. She began to cry – she cried and cried.
The next April Daisy had her little girl. About six weeks ago, she heard the name Gatsby for the first time in years. Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay. He wants to know, if you'll invite Daisy to your house some afternoon and then let him come over[44].”
The modesty of the demand shook me.
“He's afraid. He's waited so long. He wants her to see his house,” she explained. “And your house is right next door.”
“Does Daisy 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.”
Chapter 5
When I came home to West Egg that night I was afraid for a moment that my house was on fire. Two o'clock and the whole corner of the peninsula was blazing with light which fell unreal on the shrubbery and made thin elongating glints upon the roadside wires. Turning a corner I saw that it was Gatsby's house, lit from tower to cellar.
At first I thought it was another party, a wild rout that had resolved itself into “hide-and-go-seek” or “sardines-in-the-box” with all the house thrown open to the game. But there wasn't a sound. Only wind in the trees which blew the wires and made the lights go off and on again as if the house had winked into the darkness. As my taxi groaned away I saw Gatsby walking toward me across his lawn.
“Your place looks like the world's fair,” I said.
“Does it?” He turned his eyes toward it absently. “I have been glancing into some of the rooms. Let's go to Coney Island, old sport. In my car.”
“It's too late.”
“Well, suppose we take a plunge in the swimming pool? I haven't made use of it all summer.”
“I've got to go to bed.”
“All right.”
He waited, looking at me with suppressed eagerness.
“I talked with Miss Baker,”