Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasnt able to endure being at a disadvantage and given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body.
It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply I was casually sorry, and then I forgot. It was on that same house party that we had a curious conversation about driving a car. It started because she passed so close to some workmen that our fender flicked a button on one mans coat.
Youre a rotten driver, I protested. Either you ought to be more careful, or you oughtnt to drive at all.
Youre a rotten driver, I protested. Either you ought to be more careful, or you oughtnt to drive at all.
I am careful.
No, youre not.
Well, other people are, she said lightly.
Whats that got to do with it?
Theyll keep out of my way, she insisted. It takes two to make an accident.
Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.
I hope I never will, she answered. I hate careless people. Thats why I like you.
Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home. Id been writing letters once a week and signing them: Love, Nick, and all I could think of was how, when that certain girl played tennis, a faint moustache of perspiration appeared on her upper lip. Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that had to be tactfully broken off before I was free.
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.
Charter IV
On Sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages alongshore, the world and its mistress returned to Gatsbys house and twinkled hilariously on his lawn.
Hes a bootlegger, 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 nephew to Von Hindenburg[52] and second cousin to the devil. Reach me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that there crystal glass.
Once I wrote down on the empty spaces of a time-table the names of those who came to Gatsbys house that summer. It is an old time-table now, disintegrating at its folds, and headed This schedule in effect July 5th, 1922. But I can still read the grey names, and they will give you a better impression than my generalities of those who accepted Gatsbys hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing nothing whatever about him.
From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches, and a man named Bunsen, whom I knew at Yale, and Doctor Webster Civet, who was drowned last summer up in Maine[53]. And the Hornbeams and the Willie Voltaires, and a whole clan named Blackbuck, who always gathered in a corner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosoever came near. And the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr. Chrysties wife), and Edgar Beaver, whose hair, they say, turned cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all.
Clarence Endive was from East Egg, as I remember. He came only once, in white knickerbockers, and had a fight with a bum 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, 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 Swetts 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 Belugas girls.
From West 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 the Bembergs and G. Earl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon who afterward 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 ODonavan and Lestel 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.