The Great Gatsby Page #9

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan. The novel was inspired by a youthful romance Fitzgerald had with socialite Ginevra King, and the riotous parties he attended on Long Island's North Shore in 1922

• Fiction
• Novel

								

scene—his wife and Catherine scolding and consoling as they stumbled
here and there among the crowded furniture with articles of aid, and
the despairing figure on the couch, bleeding fluently, and trying to
spread a copy of Town Tattle over the tapestry scenes of
Versailles. Then Mr. McKee turned and continued on out the door.
Taking my hat from the chandelier, I followed.

“Come to lunch some day,” he suggested, as we groaned down in the
elevator.

“Where?”

“Anywhere.”

“Keep your hands off the lever,” snapped the elevator boy.

“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. McKee with dignity, “I didn’t know I was
touching it.”

“All right,” I agreed, “I’ll be glad to.”

… I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the
sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.

“Beauty and the Beast … Loneliness … Old Grocery Horse … Brook’n
Bridge …”

Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the
Pennsylvania Station, staring at the morning Tribune, and waiting for
the four o’clock train.


                                 III

There was music from my neighbour’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 watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or
taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motorboats
slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of
foam. On weekends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties
to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past
midnight, while his station 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 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 coloured 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
salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colours, and hair bobbed 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 introductions 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 swiftly, 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, become for a sharp,
joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph,
glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and colour 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, moving 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 invited. People were not
invited—they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out
to Long Island, and somehow 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 behaviour associated
with an amusement park. 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 morning with a surprisingly
formal note from his employer: the honour 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
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 commuting train. I was immediately struck by the number of
young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little
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 vicinity 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 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 was on my way to get roaring drunk from sheer embarrassment when
Jordan Baker came out of the house and stood at the head of the marble
steps, leaning a little backward 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 passersby.
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