The name sounded faintly familiar.
“He’s dead now. He used to be my best friend years ago.”
There was a small picture of Gatsby, also in yachting costume, on the bureau—Gatsby with his head thrown back defiantly—taken apparently when he was about eighteen.
“I adore it!” exclaimed Daisy. “The pompadour! You never told me you had a pompadour—or a yacht.”
“Look at this,” said Gatsby quickly. “Here’s a book I kept with clippings—about you.”
They stood side by side examining it. I was about to ask to see the rubies when the phone rang and Gatsby took up the receiver.
“I can’t talk now… Not today… No, not possibly… All right. Goodbye!”
“Come here quick!” cried Daisy at the window.
The rain was still falling, but the darkness had parted in the west, and there was a pink and golden billow of foamy clouds above the sea.
“Look at that,” she whispered, and then after a minute: “I’d like just to get one of those clouds and put you in it and push you around.”
I tried to go then, but they wouldn’t hear of it; perhaps my presence made them feel more satisfactorily alone.
“I know what we’ll do,” said Gatsby. “We’ll have Klipspringer play the piano.”
He went out of the room calling “Ewing!” and returned in a few minutes accompanied by an embarrassed, slightly worn young man with shell-rimmed glasses and scanty blond hair. He was decently clothed in a “sport-shirt” open at the neck, sneakers and duck trousers of a nebulous hue.
“Did we interrupt your exercises?” said Daisy politely.
“I was asleep,” cried Mr. Klipspringer, in a spasm of embarrassment. “That is, I’d been asleep. Then I got up…”
“Klipspringer plays the piano,” said Gatsby, cutting him short. “Don’t you, Ewing, old sport?”
“I don’t play well. I don’t—I hardly play at all. I’m all out of prac——”
“We’ll go downstairs,” interrupted Gatsby. He turned a switch. The grey windows disappeared as the house glowed full of light.
In the music room Gatsby turned on a solitary lamp beside the piano. He lit Daisy’s cigarette from a trembling match and sat down with her on a couch far across the room where there was no light save what the gleaming floor bounced in from the hall.
When Klipspringer had played “The Love Nest” he turned around on the bench and searched unhappily for Gatsby in the gloom.
“I’m all out of practice, you see. I told you I couldn’t play. I’m all out of prac——”
“Don’t talk so much, old sport,” commanded Gatsby. “Play!”
“In the morning, In the evening, Ain’t we got fun——”
Outside the wind was loud and there was a faint flow of thunder along the Sound. All the lights were going on in West Egg now; the electric trains, men-carrying, were plunging home through the rain from New York. It was the hour of a profound human change and excitement was generating on the air.
“One thing’s sure and nothing’s surer The rich get richer and the poor get—children, In the meantime, In between time——”
As I went over to say goodbye I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness could challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.
As I watched him he adjusted himself a little, visibly. His hand took hold of hers and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most with its fluctuating, feverish warmth because it couldn’t be over-dreamed—that voice was a deathless song.
They had forgotten me but Daisy glanced up and held out her hand; Gatsby didn’t know me now at all. I looked once more at them and they looked back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life. Then I went out of the room and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them there together.
CHAPTER VI
A few days later somebody brought Tom Buchanan into Gatsby’s house for a drink. It seemed strange to me that it hadn’t happened before.
It was Sunday afternoon and a party of three on horseback trotted up the drive—Tom and a man named Sloane and a pretty woman in a brown riding habit who had been there before.
“I’m delighted to see you,” said Gatsby standing on his porch. “Come right in. I’m delighted that you came.”
As though they cared!
“Sit right down. Have a cigarette or a cigar.” He walked around the room quickly, ringing bells. “I’ll have something to drink for you in just a minute.”
He was uneasy because Tom was there. But he would be uneasy anyhow until he had given them something, realizing in a vague way that that was all they came for. Mr. Sloane wanted nothing. A lemonade? No thanks. A little champagne? Nothing at all, thanks. I’m sorry——
“Did you have a nice ride?”
“Very good roads around here.”
“I suppose the automobiles——”
“Yeah.”
Gatsby turned to Tom who had accepted the introduction as a stranger.
“I believe we’ve met somewhere before, Mr. Buchanan.”
“Oh, yes,” said Tom, gruffly polite but obviously not remembering. “So we did. I remember very well.”
“About two weeks ago.”
“That’s right. You were with Nick here.”
Gatsby hesitated.
“I know your wife,” he said.
“That so?”
Tom turned to me.
“You live near here, Nick?”
“Next door.”
“That so?”
Mr. Sloane didn’t enter into the conversation but lounged back haughtily in his chair; the woman said nothing either—until unexpectedly, after two highballs, she became cordial.
“We’ll all come over to your next party, Mr. Gatsby,” she suggested. “What do you say?”
“Certainly. I’d be delighted to have you.” He nodded at Tom and at Mr. Sloane.
“Be ver’ nice,” said Mr. Sloane, without gratitude. “Well—think ought to be starting home.”
“Please don’t hurry,” Gatsby urged them. “Why don’t you—why don’t you stay for supper? I wouldn’t be surprised if some other people dropped in from New York.”
“You come to supper with me,” said the lady enthusiastically. “Both of you.”
This included me. Mr. Sloane got to his feet.
“Come along,” he said—but to her only.
“I mean it,” she insisted. “I’d love to have you. Lots of room.”
Gatsby looked at me questioningly. He was eager to go, but Mr. Sloane had evidently determined that he shouldn’t.
“I’m afraid I won’t be able to,” I said.
“Well, you come,” she urged, concentrating on Gatsby.
Mr. Sloane murmured something close to her ear.
“We won’t be late if we start now,” she protested impatiently.
“I haven’t got a horse,” apologized Gatsby. “I used to ride in the army but I’ve never bought a horse. I’ll have to follow you in my car. Excuse me for just a minute.”
The rest of us walked out on the porch where Sloane and the lady began an impassioned conversation aside.
“My God, I believe the man’s coming,” said Tom. “Doesn’t he know she doesn’t want him?”
“She says she does.”
“She has a big dinner party and he won’t know a soul there.”
Suddenly Mr. Sloane and the lady walked down the steps and mounted their horses.
“Come on,” said Mr. Sloane to Tom, “we’re late. We’ve got to go.”
Tom and I shook hands, the rest of us exchanged a cool nod and they trotted quickly down the drive, disappearing under the August foliage just as Gatsby with hat and light overcoat in hand came out of the house.
“They couldn’t wait,” I told him. “I really don’t believe there was room at the table for us. She said she’d call up another time.”
“That’s funny,” he said, with disappointment in his voice. “In fact it seems sort of rude to me.”
“It was.”
“What’s the idea, old sport?”
“They just didn’t have room for us, that’s all. She was a bit lit and didn’t realize it till she got out in the open air.”
He sat down, frowning. I think he would have liked to run into Daisy casually as a guest of someone she knew.
“Good looking fellow, isn’t he?” he said after a minute.
“Who?”
“Buchanan. Great football player wasn’t he?”
“One of the best.”
“And a good polo player too?”
“Yes, but they say the ponies he brought east aren’t any good, and he’s so stubborn he thinks they are.”
He was impressed with Tom—that came out in a moment when he spoke of getting a horse.
“I’d like to ride tonight,” he said thoughtfully. “I could telephone a barn in New York and have one sent out in a big van.”
Whether Tom, seeking new fields of amusement, brought Daisy, or Daisy suggested it to Tom I don’t know—they were at Gatsby’s house the following Saturday night. The party was a little more elaborate than any of the others; there were two orchestras for example—jazz in the gardens and intermittent “classical stuff” from the veranda above. It was a harvest dance with the immemorial decorations—sheaves of wheat, crossed rakes, and corncobs in geometrical designs—straw knee deep on the floor and a negro dressed as a field hand serving cider, which nobody wanted, at a straw covered bar. The real bar was outside, under a windmill whose blades, studded with colored lights, revolved slowly through the summer air.
Only about a third of the guests were in costume, and this included the orchestra who were dressed as “village constables.” As most of the others were village constables also the effect was given that the members of the orchestra got up at intervals and
