第12天 ! 乔丹的讲述

OneOctober day in nineteen-seventeen----

(saidJordan Baker that afternoon, sitting up very straight on a straight chair inthe tea-garden at the Plaza Hotel)

--Iwas walking along from one place to another half on the sidewalks and half onthe lawns. I was happier on the lawns because I had on shoes from England withrubber nobs on the soles that bit into the soft ground.

I hadon a new plaid skirt also that blew a little in the wind and whenever thishappened the red, white and blue banners in front of all the houses stretchedout stiff and said TUT-TUT-TUT-TUT in a disapproving way.

Thelargest of the banners and the largest of the lawns belonged to Daisy Fay's house.She was just eighteen, two years older than me, and by far the most popular ofall the young girls in Louisville. She dressed in white, and had a little whiteroadster and all day long the telephone rang in her house and excited youngofficers from Camp Taylor demanded the privilege of monopolizing her thatnight, "anyways, for an hour!"

WhenI came opposite her house that morning her white roadster was beside the curb,and she was sitting in it with a lieutenant I had never seen before. They wereso engrossed in each other that she didn't see me until I was five feet away.

"HelloJordan," she called unexpectedly. "Please come here."

I wasflattered that she wanted to speak to me, because of all the older girls Iadmired her most. She asked me if I was going to the Red Cross and makebandages. I was. Well, then, would I tell them that she couldn't come that day?The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every younggirl wants to be looked at sometime, and because it seemed romantic to me Ihave remembered the incident ever since. His name was Jay Gatsby and I didn'tlay eyes on him again for over four years--even after I'd met him on LongIsland I didn't realize it was the same man.

Thatwas nineteen-seventeen. By the next year I had a few beaux myself, and I beganto play in tournaments, so I didn't see Daisy very often.

Shewent with a slightly older crowd--when she went with anyone at all.

Wildrumors were circulating about her--how her mother had found her packing her bagone winter night to go to New York and say goodbye to a soldier who was goingoverseas. She was effectually prevented, but she wasn't on speaking terms withher family for several weeks. After that she didn't play around with thesoldiers any more but only with a few flat-footed, short-sighted young men intown who couldn't get into the army at all.

Bythe next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever. She had a debut after theArmistice, and in February she was presumably engaged to a man from NewOrleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago with more pomp andcircumstance than Louisville ever knew before. He came down with a hundredpeople in four private cars and hired a whole floor of the Seelbach Hotel, andthe day before the wedding he gave her a string of pearls valued at threehundred and fifty thousand dollars.

I wasbridesmaid. I came into her room half an hour before the bridal dinner, andfound her lying on her bed as lovely as the June night in her flowereddress--and as drunk as a monkey. She had a bottle of sauterne in one hand and aletter in the other.

"'Gratulate me," she muttered. "Never had a drink before but oh, how Ido enjoy it."

"What'sthe matter, Daisy?"

I wasscared, I can tell you; I'd never seen a girl like that before.

"Here,dearis." She groped around in a waste-basket she had with her on the bedand pulled out the string of pearls. "Take 'em downstairs and give 'emback to whoever they belong to. Tell 'em all Daisy's change' her mine. Say'Daisy's change' her mine!'."

Shebegan to cry--she cried and cried. I rushed out and found her mother's maid andwe locked the door and got her into a cold bath. She wouldn't let go of theletter. She took it into the tub with her and squeezed it up into a wet ball,and only let me leave it in the soap dish when she saw that it was coming topieces like snow.

Butshe didn't say another word. We gave her spirits of ammonia and put ice on herforehead and hooked her back into her dress and half an hour later when wewalked out of the room the pearls were around her neck and the incident wasover. Next day at five o'clock she married Tom Buchanan without so much as ashiver and started off on a three months' trip to the South Seas.

I sawthem in Santa Barbara when they came back and I thought I'd never seen a girlso mad about her husband. If he left the room for a minute she'd look arounduneasily and say "Where's Tom gone?" and wear the most abstractedexpression until she saw him coming in the door. She used to sit on the sandwith his head in her lap by the hour rubbing her fingers over his eyes andlooking at him with unfathomable delight. It was touching to see themtogether--it made you laugh in a hushed, fascinated way. That was in August. Aweek after I left Santa Barbara Tom ran into a wagon on the Ventura road onenight and ripped a front wheel off his car. The girl who was with him got intothe papers too because her arm was broken--she was one of the chambermaids inthe Santa Barbara Hotel.

Thenext April Daisy had her little girl and they went to France for a year. I sawthem one spring in Cannes and later in Deauville and then they came back toChicago to settle down. Daisy was popular in Chicago, as you know. They movedwith a fast crowd, all of them young and rich and wild, but she came out withan absolutely perfect reputation.

Perhapsbecause she doesn't drink. It's a great advantage not to drink amonghard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and, moreover, you can time anylittle irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that theydon't see or care. Perhaps Daisy never went in for amour at all--and yetthere's something in that voice of hers....

Well,about six weeks ago, she heard the name Gatsby for the first time in years. Itwas when I asked you--do you remember?--if you knew Gatsby in West Egg. Afteryou had gone home she came into my room and woke me up, and said "WhatGatsby?" and when I described him--I was half asleep--she said in thestrangest voice that it must be the man she used to know. It wasn't until thenthat I connected this Gatsby with the officer in her white car.

WhenJordan Baker had finished telling all this we had left the Plaza for half anhour and were driving in a Victoria through Central Park.

Thesun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in the WestFifties and the clear voices of girls, already gathered like crickets on thegrass, rose through the hot twilight:

"I'mthe Sheik of Araby, Your love belongs to me.

Atnight when you're are asleep,

Intoyour tent I'll creep----"

"Itwas a strange coincidence," I said.

"Butit wasn't a coincidence at all."

"Whynot?"

"Gatsbybought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay."

Thenit had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. Hecame alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor.

"Hewants to know--" continued Jordan "--if you'll invite Daisy to yourhouse some afternoon and then let him come over."

Themodesty of the demand shook me. He had waited five years and bought a mansionwhere he dispensed starlight to casual moths so that he could "comeover" some afternoon to a stranger's garden.

"DidI have to know all this before he could ask such a little thing?"

"He'safraid. He's waited so long. He thought you might be offended.

Yousee he's a regular tough underneath it all."

Somethingworried me.

"Whydidn't he ask you to arrange a meeting?"

"Hewants her to see his house," she explained. "And your house is rightnext door."

"Oh!"

"Ithink he half expected her to wander into one of his parties, some night,"went on Jordan, "but she never did. Then he began asking people casuallyif they knew her, and I was the first one he found.

Itwas that night he sent for me at his dance, and you should have heard theelaborate way he worked up to it. Of course, I immediately suggested a luncheonin New York--and I thought he'd go mad:

"'I don't want to do anything out of the way!' he kept saying. 'I want to seeher right next door.'

"WhenI said you were a particular friend of Tom's he started to abandon the wholeidea. He doesn't know very much about Tom, though he says he's read a Chicagopaper for years just on the chance of catching a glimpse of Daisy's name."

Itwas dark now, and as we dipped under a little bridge I put my arm aroundJordan's golden shoulder and drew her toward me and asked her to dinner.Suddenly I wasn't thinking of Daisy and Gatsby any more but of this clean,hard, limited person who dealt in universal skepticism and who leaned backjauntily just within the circle of my arm. A phrase began to beat in my earswith a sort of heady excitement: "There are only the pursued, thepursuing, the busy and the tired."

"AndDaisy ought to have something in her life," murmured Jordan to me.

"Doesshe want to see Gatsby?"

"She'snot to know about it. Gatsby doesn't want her to know. You're just supposed toinvite her to tea."

Wepassed a barrier of dark trees, and then the facade of Fifty-ninth Street, ablock of delicate pale light, beamed down into the park.

Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied facefloated along the dark cornices and blinding signs and so I drew up the girlbeside me, tightening my arms. Her wan, scornful mouth smiled and so I drew herup again, closer, this time to my face.