Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York – every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. 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 corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby's enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.
When I went to Gatsby's house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited[33]. People were not invited – they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island[34] and somehow they ended up at Gatsby's door. Sometimes they came and went without having met Gatsby at all.
I had been actually invited. A chauffeur in a uniform gave me a formal note from his employer – the honor would be entirely Jay Gatsby's[35], it said, if I would attend his little party that night.
Dressed up in white flannels I went over to his lawn a little after seven. I was immediately struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry.
As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table – the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.
I noticed Jordan Baker with two girls in yellow dresses.
“Hello!” they cried together.
“Are you looking for Gatsby?” asked the first girl.
“There's something funny about him,” said the other girl eagerly. “Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.”
“I don't think it's so much THAT[36],” argued her friend. “It's more that he was a German spy during the war.”
“Oh, no,” said the first girl. “I'll bet he killed a man.”
I tried to find the host. Champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger bowls.
The moon had risen higher. I was still with Jordan Baker. We were sitting at a table with a man of about my age. I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.
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.”
“Oh! I knew I'd seen you somewhere before.”
He told me that he had just bought a hydroplane and was going to try it out in the morning.
“Want to go with me, old sport[37]?”
“What time?”
“Any time that suits you best.”
“This is an unusual party for me. I haven't even seen the host. 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 a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across[38] 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. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished – and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. 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 servant hurried toward him with the information that Chicago was calling him on the wire. He excused himself with a small bow.
“If you want anything just ask for it, old sport,” he urged me. “Excuse me. I will rejoin you later.”
When he was gone I turned immediately to Jordan.
“Who is he?” I demanded. “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[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.