Chapter 3

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 cham-
pagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched

his guests diving from the tower of his raft or taking the

sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats

slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cat-
aracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an

omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city, between

nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his sta-
tion wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all

trains. And on Mondays eight servants including an extra

gardener toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes

and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages 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 left his back door in a pyramid of pulp-
less 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

44 The Great Gatsby

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.

By seven o’clock the orchestra has arrived—no thin five-
piece affair but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and

saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos 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 five deep in the drive, and already the halls and sa-
lons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors and hair

shorn in strange new ways and shawls beyond the dreams

of Castile. The bar is in full swing and floating rounds of

cocktails permeate the garden outside until the air is alive

with chatter and laughter and casual innuendo and intro-
ductions forgotten on the spot and enthusiastic meetings

between women who never knew each other’s names.

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from

the sun and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail

music and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter

is easier, minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped

out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swift-
ly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same

breath—already there are wanderers, confident girls who

weave here and there among the stouter and more stable,

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become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group

and then excited with triumph glide on through the sea-
change of faces and voices and color under the constantly

changing light.

Suddenly one of these gypsies in trembling opal, seizes a

cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and mov-
ing her hands like Frisco dances out alone on the canvas

platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies

his rhythm obligingly for her and there is a burst of chatter

as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray’s

understudy from the ‘Follies.’ The party has begun.

I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house

I was one of the few guests who had actually been invit-
ed. People were not invited—they went there. They got into

automobiles which bore them out to Long Island and some-
how they ended up at Gatsby’s door. Once there they were

introduced by somebody who knew Gatsby and after that

they conducted themselves according to the rules of be-
havior associated with amusement parks. 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 admission.

I had been actually invited. A chauffeur in a uniform of

robin’s egg blue crossed my lawn early that Saturday morn-
ing with a surprisingly formal note from his employer—the

honor would be entirely Gatsby’s, it said, if I would attend

his ‘little party’ that night. He had seen me several times

and had intended to call on me long before but a peculiar

combination of circumstances had prevented it—signed Jay

46 The Great Gatsby

Gatsby in a majestic hand.

Dressed up in white flannels I went over to his lawn a

little after seven and wandered around rather ill-at-ease

among swirls and eddies of people I didn’t know—though

here and there was a face I had noticed on the commut-
ing train. I was immediately struck by the number of young

Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a lit-
tle hungry and all talking in low earnest voices to solid and

prosperous Americans. I was sure that they were selling

something: bonds or insurance or automobiles. They were,

at least, agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicin-
ity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the

right key.

As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host

but the two or three people of whom I asked his where-
abouts 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 was on my way to get roaring drunk from sheer em-
barrassment when Jordan Baker came out of the house and

stood at the head of the marble steps, leaning a little back-
ward and 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.

‘Hello!’ I roared, advancing toward her. My voice seemed

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 47

unnaturally loud across the garden.

‘I thought you might be here,’ she responded 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 gave ear 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 fi-
nals the week before.

‘You don’t know who we are,’ said one of the girls in yel-
low, ‘but we met you here about a month ago.’

‘You’ve dyed your hair since then,’ remarked Jordan, and

I started but the girls had moved casually on and her re-
mark was addressed to the premature moon, produced like

the supper, no doubt, out of a caterer’s basket. With Jordan’s

slender golden arm resting in mine we descended the steps

and sauntered about the garden. 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. Mumble.

‘Do you come to these parties often?’ inquired Jordan of

the girl beside her.

‘The last one was the one I met you at,’ answered the girl,

in an alert, 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

gown on a chair, and he asked me my name and address—

48 The Great Gatsby

inside of a week I got a package from Croirier’s with a new

evening gown 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 and had to be altered. It was gas blue with

lavender beads. 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 inquired.

‘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 skepti-
cally; ‘it’s more that he was a German spy during the war.’

One of the men nodded in confirmation.

‘I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew

up with him in Germany,’ he 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 her she leaned forward with enthusiasm.

‘You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody’s look-
ing 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. It was testimo-
ny to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were

whispers about him from those who found little that it was

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 49

necessary to whisper about in this world.

The first supper—there would be another one after mid-
night—was now being served, and Jordan invited me to join

her own party who were spread around a table on the other

side of the garden. There were three married couples and

Jordan’s escort, a persistent undergraduate given to violent

innuendo and obviously under the impression that sooner

or later Jordan was going to yield him up her person to a

greater or lesser degree. Instead of rambling this party had

preserved a dignified homogeneity, and assumed to itself the

function of representing the staid nobility of the country-
side—East Egg condescending to West Egg, and carefully

on guard against its spectroscopic gayety.

‘Let’s get out,’ whispered Jordan, after a somehow waste-
ful and inappropriate half 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 undergraduate nodded in a cynical, melan-
choly way.

The bar, where we glanced first, 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 tried

an important-looking door, and walked into a high Goth-
ic library, panelled with carved English oak, and probably

transported complete from some ruin overseas.

A stout, middle-aged man with enormous owl-eyed spec-
tacles was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great

table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of

50 The Great Gatsby

books. As we entered he wheeled excitedly around and ex-
amined Jordan from head to foot.

‘What do you think?’ he demanded impetuously.

‘About what?’

He waved his hand toward the book-shelves.

‘About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to as-
certain. I ascertained. They’re real.’

‘The books?’

He nodded.

‘Absolutely real—have pages and everything. I thought

they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re

absolutely real. Pages and—Here! Lemme show you.’

Taking our skepticism for granted, he rushed to the

bookcases and returned with Volume One of the ‘Stoddard

Lectures.’

‘See!’ he cried triumphantly. ‘It’s a bona fide piece of

printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco.

It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew

when to stop too—didn’t cut the pages. But what do you

want? What do you expect?’

He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on

its shelf muttering that if one brick was removed the whole

library was liable to collapse.

‘Who brought you?’ he demanded. ‘Or did you just come?

I was brought. Most people were brought.’

Jordan looked at him alertly, cheerfully without answer-
ing.

‘I was brought by a woman named Roosevelt,’ he con-
tinued. ‘Mrs. Claud Roosevelt. Do you know her? I met her

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 51

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 gravely and went back out-
doors.

There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden,

old men pushing young girls backward in eternal grace-
less circles, superior couples holding each other tortuously,

fashionably and keeping in the corners—and a great num-
ber of single girls dancing individualistically or relieving

the orchestra for a moment of the burden of the banjo or the

traps. By midnight the hilarity had increased. A celebrated

tenor had sung in Italian and a notorious contralto had sung

in jazz and between the numbers people were doing ‘stunts’

all over the garden, while happy vacuous bursts of laughter

rose toward the summer sky. A pair of stage ‘twins’—who

turned out to be the girls in yellow—did a baby act in cos-
tume and champagne was served in glasses bigger than

finger bowls. The moon had risen higher, and floating in the

Sound was a triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to the

stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawn.

I was still with Jordan Baker. We were sitting at a table

with a man of about my age and a rowdy little girl who gave

way upon the slightest provocation to uncontrollable laugh-
ter. I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls

52 The Great Gatsby

of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes

into something significant, elemental and profound.

At a lull 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 Infantry until June nineteen-eigh-
teen. I knew I’d seen you somewhere before.’

We talked for a moment about some wet, grey little vil-
lages in France. Evidently he lived in this vicinity for 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? Just near the shore along

the Sound.’

‘What time?’

‘Any time that suits you best.’

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask his name when Jor-
dan looked around and smiled.

‘Having a gay time now?’ she inquired.

‘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

hedge 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 under-
stand.

‘I’m Gatsby,’ he said suddenly.

‘What!’ I exclaimed. ‘Oh, I beg your pardon.’

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‘I thought you knew, old sport. I’m afraid I’m not a very

good host.’

He smiled understandingly—much more than under-
standingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of

eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or

five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole ex-
ternal 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 van-
ished—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