Chapter III

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 looked at his guests who were diving from the tower of his raft, or sunbathing on the hot sand of his beach. Some guests used to take his two motor-boats, drawing aquaplanes⁵⁹ over the foamy waters. On weekends his Rolls-Royce became a bus, transporting parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, worked hard all day with mops and scrubbing brushes and hammers and secateurs, repairing the damage 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 were left in a pyramid of peels at his back door. 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 lot of providers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby’s enormous garden. Spiced baked hams, salads of multicolored designs, pastry pigs and dark gold turkeys were crowded on buffet tables. In the main hall there was a bar full of gins and liquors.

By seven o’clock the orchestra has arrived – a great number of musicians with their trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and flutes, 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 in five lines in the driveway, and already the halls and salons and verandas are colorful with bright clothes and hair cut in strange new ways. The bar is in full use, and floating rounds of cocktails go throughout the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and introductions forgotten immediately, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names.

The lights grow brighter as the earth turns away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing cocktail music, and the opera of voices sounds louder. Laughter is easier minute by minute, caused by any cheerful word. The groups change more quickly, grow with new arrivals, disappear and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who turn up here and there among the more solid ladies, become the center of a group for a moment, and then, excited with triumph, walk on through the sea of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.

Suddenly one of these girls takes a cocktail out of the air, drinks it for courage and dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary silence; the orchestra leader changes his rhythm specially for her. The party has begun.

I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests whom he had actually invited. People were not invited – they went there. They got into automobiles which brought them to Gatsby’s door. 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 admission⁶⁰.

Gatsby had actually invited me by a surprisingly formal note. It said it would be the honor, if I attended his “little party” that night. He had seen me several times, and had intended to visit me long before, but circumstances had prevented it – signed Jay Gatsby.

Dressed up in white flannels I went over to his lawn a little after seven, and wandered around feeling uncomfortable among the people I didn’t know – though here and there was a face I had noticed on the train. As soon as I arrived I made a try to find my host, but the two or three people of whom I asked about him stared at me in such a surprise, that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table – the only place in the garden where a single man could stand without looking alone.

I was on my way to get drunk from simple embarrassment when Jordan Baker came out of the house and stood at the head of the marble steps, 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.⁶¹

“Hello!” I cried, going toward her. My voice seemed unnaturally loud across the garden.

“I thought you might be here,” she answered 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 listened 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. The girls moved on. With Jordan’s golden arm resting in mine, we descended the steps. 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. Mumble⁶².

“Do you come to these parties often?” asked Jordan the girl beside her.

“The last one was a month ago when I met you here,” answered the girl, in a 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 dress on a chair, and he asked me my name and address – in half a week I got a package from Croirier’s⁶³ with a new evening dress 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. 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 asked.

“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.”

“I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in Germany,” one of the men 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 her⁶⁴ 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.

The first supper – there would be another one after midnight – was served, and Jordan invited me to join her own party. There were three married couples and Jordan’s escort, a persistent undergraduate who was obviously sure that sooner or later Jordan was going to be with him. This party, unlike the others, tried to stay the noble representatives⁶⁵ of the East Egg and resisted the gaiety of Gatsby’s guests.

“Let’s get out,” whispered Jordan, after a somehow wasteful and boring half an 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 bar 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 walked into a high Gothic library, paneled with carved English oak.

A middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed glasses, was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, looking at the shelves of books. As we entered he turned around and examined Jordan from head to foot.

“What do you think about that?” he waved his hand toward the book-shelves. “As a matter of fact they’re real. I’ve checked.”

“The books?”

He nodded.

“Absolutely real – have pages and everything. I thought they would be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real! Let me show you,” he rushed to the bookcases and returned with a book. “See!” he cried triumphantly. “It fooled me. It’s a triumph. What realism! What do you expect?”

He snatched the book from me and replaced it quickly on its shelf.

“Who brought you?” he asked. “Or did you just come? I was brought. Most people were brought.”

Jordan looked at him cheerfully, without answering.

“I was brought by a woman named Roosevelt,” he continued. “Mrs. Claude 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 and went back outdoors. There was dancing now in the garden; old men pushing young girls backward in circles, couples holding each other fashionably, and a great number of single girls dancing individualistically. By midnight the hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor had sung in Italian, and a famous contralto had sung in jazz, and happy bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky. Champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger-bowls⁶⁶. I was still with Jordan Baker. We were sitting at a table with a man of about my age and a little girl, who gave way 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 important.

At a pause 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 Infantry⁶⁷ until June nineteen-eighteen. I knew I’d seen you somewhere before.”

We talked for a moment about some wet, gray little villages in France. Evidently he lived in this neighborhood, as he told me that he had just bought a hydroplane⁶⁸, and was going to try it out in the morning.

“Want to go with me, old sport⁶⁹? Just near the shore along the bay.”

“What time?”

“Any time you like.”

I was about to ask his name when Jordan looked around and smiled.

“Having a gay time now?” she asked.

“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 fence 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 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