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The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Chapter 4 - Part 3
One October day in nineteen-seventeen——
(said Jordan Baker1 that afternoon, sitting up very straight on a straight chair in the tea-garden at the Plaza2 Hotel)
—I was walking along from one place to another, half on the sidewalks and half on the lawns. I was happier on the lawns because I had on shoes from England with rubber nobs on the soles that bit into the soft ground. I had on a new plaid skirt also that blew a little in the wind, and whenever this happened the red, white, and blue banners in front of all the houses stretched out stiff and said TUT-TUT-TUT-TUT, in a disapproving3 way.
The largest 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 of all the young girls in Louisville. She dressed in white, and had a little white roadster, and all day long the telephone rang in her house and excited young officers from Camp Taylor demanded the privilege of monopolizing4 her that night. “Anyways, for an hour!”
When I came opposite her house that morning her white roadster was beside the curb5, and she was sitting in it with a lieutenant6 I had never seen before. They were so engrossed7 in each other that she didn’t see me until I was five feet away.
“Hello, Jordan,” she called unexpectedly. “Please come here.”
I was flattered that she wanted to speak to me, because of all the older girls I admired her most. She asked me if I was going to the Red Cross and make bandages. 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 young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since. His name was Jay Gatsby, and I didn’t lay eyes on him again for over four years—even after I’d met him on Long Island I didn’t realize it was the same man.
That was nineteen-seventeen. By the next year I had a few beaux myself, and I began to play in tournaments, so I didn’t see Daisy very often. She went with a slightly older crowd—when she went with anyone at all. Wild rumors9 were circulating about her—how her mother had found her packing her bag one winter night to go to New York and say good-by to a soldier who was going overseas. She was effectually prevented, but she wasn’t on speaking terms with her family for several weeks. After that she didn’t play around with the soldiers any more, but only with a few flat-footed, short-sighted young men in town, who couldn’t get into the army at all.
By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever. She had a debut10 after the Armistice11, and in February she was presumably engaged to a man from New Orleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago, with more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before. He came down with a hundred people in four private cars, and hired a whole floor of the Seelbach Hotel, and the day before the wedding he gave her a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
I was bridesmaid. I came into her room half an hour before the bridal dinner, and found her lying on her bed as lovely as the June night in her flowered dress—and as drunk as a monkey. she had a bottle of Sauterne in one hand and a letter in the other.
“‘Gratulate me,” she muttered. “Never had a drink before, but oh how I do enjoy it.”
“What’s the matter, Daisy?”
I was scared, I can tell you; I’d never seen a girl like that before.
“Here, deares’.” She groped around in a waste-basket she had with her on the bed and pulled out the string of pearls. “Take ’em down-stairs and give ’em back to whoever they belong to. Tell ’em all Daisy’s change’ her mine. Say: ‘Daisy’s change’ her mine!’.”
She began to cry—she cried and cried. I rushed out and found her mother’s maid, and we locked the door and got her into a cold bath. She wouldn’t let go of the letter. 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 to pieces like snow.
But she didn’t say another word. We gave her spirits of ammonia and put ice on her forehead and hooked her back into her dress, and half an hour later, when we walked out of the room, the pearls were around her neck and the incident was over. Next day at five o’clock she married Tom Buchanan without so much as a shiver, and started off on a three months’ trip to the South Seas.
I saw them in Santa Barbara when they came back, and I thought I’d never seen a girl so mad about her husband. If he left the room for a minute she’d look around uneasily, and say: “Where’s Tom gone?” and wear the most abstracted expression until she saw him coming in the door. She used to sit on the sand with his head in her lap by the hour, rubbing her fingers over his eyes and looking at him with unfathomable delight. It was touching12 to see them together—it made you laugh in a hushed, fascinated way. That was in August. A week after I left Santa Barbara Tom ran into a wagon13 on the Ventura road one night, and ripped a front wheel off his car. The girl who was with him got into the papers, too, because her arm was broken—she was one of the chambermaids in the Santa Barbara Hotel.
The next April Daisy had her little girl, and they went to France for a year. I saw them one spring in Cannes, and later in Deauville, and then they came back to Chicago to settle down. Daisy was popular in Chicago, as you know. They moved with a fast crowd, all of them young and rich and wild, but she came out with an absolutely perfect reputation. Perhaps because she doesn’t drink. It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care. Perhaps Daisy never went in for amour at all—and yet there’s something in that voice of hers. . . .
Well, about six weeks ago, she heard the name Gatsby for the first time in years. It was when I asked you—do you remember?—if you knew Gatsby in West Egg. After you had gone home she came into my room and woke me up, and said: “What Gatsby?” and when I described him—I was half asleep—she said in the strangest voice that it must be the man she used to know. It wasn’t until then that I connected this Gatsby with the officer in her white car.
When Jordan Baker had finished telling all this we had left the Plaza for half an hour and were driving in a victoria through Central Park. The sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in the West Fifties, and the clear voices of girls, already gathered like crickets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight14:
“I’m the Sheik of Araby.
Your love belongs to me.
At night when you’re are asleep
Into your tent I’ll creep——”
“It was a strange coincidence,” I said.
“But it wasn’t a coincidence at all.”
“Why not?”
“Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay.”
Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired15 on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor16.
“He wants to know,” continued Jordan, “if you’ll invite Daisy to your house some afternoon and then let him come over.”
The modesty17 of the demand shook me. He had waited five years and bought a mansion18 where he dispensed19 starlight to casual moths—so that he could “come over.” some afternoon to a stranger’s garden.
“Did I have to know all this before he could ask such a little thing?”
“He’s afraid, he’s waited so long. He thought you might be offended. You see, he’s a regular tough underneath20 it all.”
Something worried me.
“Why didn’t he ask you to arrange a meeting?”
“He wants her to see his house,” she explained. “And your house is right next door.”
“Oh!”
“I think 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 casually21 if they knew her, and I was the first one he found. It was that night he sent for me at his dance, and you should have heard the elaborate way he worked up to it. Of course, I immediately suggested a luncheon22 in 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 see her right next door.’
“When I said you were a particular friend of Tom’s, he started to abandon the whole idea. He doesn’t know very much about Tom, though he says he’s read a Chicago paper for years just on the chance of catching23 a glimpse of Daisy’s name.”
It was dark now, and as we dipped under a little bridge I put my arm around Jordan’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 scepticism, and who leaned back jauntily24 just within the circle of my arm. A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”
“And Daisy ought to have something in her life,” murmured Jordan to me.
“Does she want to see Gatsby?”
“She’s not to know about it. Gatsby doesn’t want her to know. You’re just supposed to invite her to tea.”
We passed a barrier of dark trees, and then the facade25 of Fifty-ninth Street, a block of delicate pale light, beamed down into the park. Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs, and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening26 my arms. Her wan8, scornful mouth smiled, and so I drew her up again closer, this time to my face.
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1
baker
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| n.面包师 | |
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2
plaza
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| n.广场，市场 | |
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3
disapproving
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| adj.不满的，反对的v.不赞成( disapprove的现在分词 ) | |
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4
monopolizing
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| v.垄断( monopolize的现在分词 )；独占；专卖；专营 | |
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5
curb
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| n.场外证券市场，场外交易；vt.制止，抑制 | |
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6
lieutenant
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| n.陆军中尉，海军上尉；代理官员，副职官员 | |
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7
engrossed
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| adj.全神贯注的 | |
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8
wan
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| (wide area network)广域网 | |
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9
rumors
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| n.传闻( rumor的名词复数 )；[古]名誉；咕哝；[古]喧嚷v.传闻( rumor的第三人称单数 )；[古]名誉；咕哝；[古]喧嚷 | |
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10
debut
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| n.首次演出，初次露面 | |
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armistice
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| n.休战，停战协定 | |
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12
touching
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| adj.动人的，使人感伤的 | |
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13
wagon
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| n.四轮马车，手推车，面包车；无盖运货列车 | |
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14
twilight
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| n.暮光，黄昏；暮年，晚期，衰落时期 | |
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15
aspired
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| v.渴望，追求( aspire的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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splendor
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| n.光彩；壮丽，华丽；显赫，辉煌 | |
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modesty
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| n.谦逊，虚心，端庄，稳重，羞怯，朴素 | |
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18
mansion
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| n.大厦，大楼；宅第 | |
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19
dispensed
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| v.分配( dispense的过去式和过去分词 )；施与；配（药） | |
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20
underneath
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| adj.在...下面，在...底下；adv.在下面 | |
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21
casually
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| adv.漠不关心地，无动于衷地，不负责任地 | |
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22
luncheon
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| n.午宴，午餐，便宴 | |
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23
catching
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| adj.易传染的，有魅力的，迷人的，接住 | |
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24
jauntily
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| adv.心满意足地；洋洋得意地；高兴地；活泼地 | |
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25
facade
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| n.(建筑物的)正面，临街正面；外表 | |
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tightening
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| 上紧，固定，紧密 | |
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