Clarence Endive was from West Egg, as I remember. He came only once, in white knickerbockers, and had a fight with a tough named Etty in the garden. From farther out on the Island came the Cheadles and the O. R. P. Schraeders and the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of Georgia, still violently impassioned about the Civil War, and the Fishguards and the Ripley Snells. Snell was there three days before he went to the penitentiary, so drunk out on the gravel drive that 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 girls.
From East Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys and Cecil Roebuck and Cecil Schoen and Gulick, the state senator, and Newton Orchid who controlled Films Par Excellence and Eckhaust and Clyde Cohen and Don S. Schwartze (the son) and Arthur McCarty, all connected with the movies in one way or another. And the Catlips and Bembergs and G. Earl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon who afterwards strangled his wife. Da Fontano the promoter came there and Ed Legros and James B. (“Rot-Gut”) Ferret and the de Jongs and Ernest Lilly—they came to gamble and when Ferret wandered into the garden it meant he was cleaned out and Associated Traction would have to fluctuate profitably next day.
A man named Klipspringer was there so often and so long that he became known as “the boarder”—I doubt if he had any other home. Of theatrical people there were Gus Waize and Horace O’Donavan and Lester Myer and George Duckweed and Francis Bull. Also from New York were the Chromes and the Backhyssons and the Dennickers and Russel Betty and the Corrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewars and the Scullys and S. W. Belcher and the Smirkes and the young Quinns, divorced now, and Henry L. Palmetto who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square.
Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls. They were never quite the same ones in physical person but they were so identical with one another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before. I have forgotten their names—Jaqueline, I think, or else Consuela or Gloria or Judy or June, and their last names were either the melodious names of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American capitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to be.
In addition to all these I can remember that the Ascott-Joneses came there at least once and the Cockerell girls and young Brewer who had his nose shot off in the war and Mr. Albrucksburger and Miss Haag, his fiancee, and Ardita Fitz-Peters and Mr. P. Jewett, once head of the American Legion, and Miss Claudia Hip with a man reputed to be her chauffeur, and a prince of something whom we called Duke and whose name, if I ever knew it, I have forgotten.
All these people came to Gatsby’s house in the summer.
At nine o’clock one morning late in July Gatsby’s gorgeous car lurched up the rocky drive to my door and gave out a burst of melody from its three noted horn. 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 polite invitation, made frequent use of his beach.
“Hello, old sport,” he said. “You’re having lunch with me in the city today and I thought you might like to ride up now.”
That formal caution that enveloped his every word was less perceptible in the daytime; as he stood balancing on the running board of his car he seemed very natural, after all. His body had about it that American resourcefulness of movement—a characteristic that is due, I suppose, to the absence of heavy lifting work in youth and, even more, to the formless grace of our nervous sporadic games.
“I suppose you’ve seen my car?”
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 wind-shields that mirrored a dozen suns.
“Handsomest car in New York,” he informed me. “I know it’s pretty gay, but what’s the use of riding around in a big hearse?”
Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory we started to town.
“I’ve got a favor to ask you, old sport,” he said, “and I want to inquire one thing before I begin.”
“All right.”
“Have you ever had what’s known as an affaire de coeur?”
“Why—never a very serious one.”
“Never?” he insisted.
“Never.”
He patted the knee of his caramel-colored suit.
“Very well,” he decided. “I’ll have to begin in a different way. Let me ask you this: What’s your opinion of me anyhow?”
A little overwhelmed I began the generalized evasions which that question deserves.
“Be frank, old sport,” he urged me.
But I didn’t know what I thought of him yet, and so as a facetious substitute I passed on to him, as well as I could remember, the various sinister accusations that had flavored conversation in his halls.
“I’ll tell you God’s truth.” His right hand suddenly ordered divine retribution to stand by. “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’s a sort of tradition.”
He looked at me sideways—and I know 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 casually.
“San Francisco.”
“I see.”
“My family all died and I came into a good deal of money.”
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.
“After that I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe—Paris, Vienna, Rome—collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting big game, painting a little, things for myself only and trying to forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago.”
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 turbanned “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 accepted a commission as second lieutenant when it began. In the Argonne Forest I took the remains of my machine-gun battalion so far forward that there was a half mile gap on either side of us where the infantry couldn’t advance. We stayed there two days and two nights, a hundred and ninety men with fourteen Lewis guns, and when the infantry came up at last they found the insignia of three German divisions among the piles of dead. I was promoted to be a major and every Allied government gave me a decoration—even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!”
Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them with a faint smile. My incredulity had turned to fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.
He reached in his pocket and a piece of metal, slung on a ribbon, fell into my palm.
“That’s the one from Montenegro.”
To my astonishment the thing had an authentic look. “Orderi di Danilo,” ran the circular legend, “Montenegro, Nicolas Rex.”
“Turn it.”
“Major Jay Gatsby,” I read, “For Valour Extraordinary.”
“Here’s another thing I always carry. A souvenir of Oxford days. It was taken in Trinity Quad—the man on my left is now the Earl of Doncaster.”
It was a photograph of half a dozen young men in blazers loafing in front of an archway through which were visible a host of spires. There was Gatsby, looking a little, not much, younger—with a cricket bat in his hand.
Then it was all true. I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace on the Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart; I saw his family fading away in their palatial home in San Francisco and leaving their fortune to a reckless young major at the wars.
“I’m going to make a great request of you today,” he said, pocketing his souvenirs, “so I thought you ought to know something about me. I didn’t want you to think I was just a—just a nobody.”
I’d never thought that. Now I began to believe that he was an extraordinary idealist, and fatuous only as all men are who have actually achieved their own ideals.
“I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad thing that happened to me.” He hesitated, “but I came here to remember, not to forget. You’ll hear about it this afternoon.”
“At lunch?”
“No, this afternoon. I happened to find out that you’re taking
