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[3] last May. If you read the papers you know there was a big sensation – 'Jazz History of the World.'”
Gatsby was standing alone on the marble steps and looking from one group to another. I could see nothing sinister about him. Maybe he was not drinking at all.
“I beg your pardon.”
Gatsby's servant was 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, and followed the servant toward the house. I noticed that she wore her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes.
I was alone and it was almost two o'clock. 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. That lady was singing. She had drunk a quantity of champagne and she was not only singing, she was weeping too. Whenever there was a pause in the song she filled it with broken sobs. The tears coursed down her cheeks. Soon she 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 who was standing nearby.
I looked around. The hall was at present occupied by two men and their wives. The wives were talking to each other, “Whenever he sees I'm having a good time he wants to go home. We're always the first ones to leave.”
“So are we.”
“Well, we're almost the last tonight,” said one of the men. “The orchestra left half an hour ago.”
The door of the library opened and Jordan Baker and Gatsby came out together.
“I've just heard the most amazing story,” Jordan whispered to me. “How long were we in there?”
“Why – about an hour.”
“It was simply amazing,” she repeated. “But I swore I wouldn't tell it anybody.”
She yawned gracefully in my face. “Please come and see me… Phone book… Under the name of Mrs. Sigourney Howard… My aunt…”
I joined the last of Gatsby's guests who gathered around him. I wanted to apologize: I had not known him in the garden.
“Don't mention it, old sport,” he said. “And don't forget we're going up in the hydroplane tomorrow morning at nine o'clock.”
The servant behind his shoulder said:
“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. “Good night, old sport… Good night.”
As I walked down the steps I saw that the party was not over. In the ditch beside the road rested a new automobile which had left Gatsby's drive two minutes before. A dozen curious chauffeurs left their automobiles blocking the road and were watching the scene.
A man in a long coat had dismounted from the wreck and now stood in the middle of the road, looking from the automobile to the observers and from the observers to the automobile.
“See!” he explained. “It went in the ditch.”
I recognized the man – I met him in the 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 he. “I know very little about driving – next to nothing. It happened, and that's all I know.”
“Well, if you're a poor driver why did you drive at night?”
“But I wasn't driving,” he explained, “I wasn't even trying.”
“Do you want to commit suicide?”
“You don't understand,” explained he. “I wasn't driving. There's another man in the automobile.”
The door of the automobile slowly opened. The crowd – it was now a crowd – stepped back and when the door had opened wide there was a pause. Then, very gradually, part by part, a man appeared.
“What's the matter?” he inquired calmly.
“Look!”
Half a dozen fingers pointed at the wheel.
“It came off,” someone explained.
He nodded.
“At first I didn't notice we had stopped.”
A pause. Then he remarked in a determined voice:
“Could you tell me where is a gas station?”
At least a dozen men explained to him that wheel and automobile were no longer joined.
“We will drive slowly,” he said.
“But the WHEEL'S off!”
He hesitated.
“We will try,” he said.
I turned away and went toward home. I glanced back once. A moon was shining over Gatsby's house.
I began to like New York. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and watch romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives. For a while I lost sight of Jordan Baker, and then in midsummer I found her again. I liked to walk 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 curiosity.
Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever men. She was incurably dishonest. 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[4],” 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. Give me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that crystal glass.”
Once I wrote down the names of those who came to Gatsby's house that summer. I can still read the names and they will give you a good impression of those who accepted Gatsby's hospitality.
From East Egg 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 the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr. Chrystie's wife), and Edgar Beaver, whose hair turned white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all.
Clarence Endive was from East Egg, as I remember. He came only once and had a fight with a man named Etty in the garden. From farther side of 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 jail, he was lying drunk on the gravel drive, and 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 daughters.
From West Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys