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Френсис Скотт Фицджеральд
I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way East, and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.
‘Do they miss me?’ she cried ecstatically.
‘The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath, and there’s a persistent wail all night along the north shore.’
‘How gorgeous! Let’s go back, Tom. Tomorrow!’ Then she added irrelevantly: ‘You ought to see the baby.’
‘I’d like to.’
‘She’s asleep. She’s three years old. Haven’t you ever seen her?’
‘Never.’
‘Well, you ought to see her. She’s —’
Tom Buchanan, who had been hovering restlessly about the room, stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.
‘What you doing, Nick?’
‘I’m a bond man.’
‘Who with?’
I told him.
‘Never heard of them,’ he remarked decisively.
This annoyed me.
‘You will,’ I answered shortly. ‘You will if you stay in the East.’
‘Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry,’ he said glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. ‘I’d be a God damned fool to live anywhere else.’
At this point Miss Baker said: ‘Absolutely!’ with such suddenness that I started – it was the first word she had uttered since I came into the room. Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.
‘I’m stiff,’ she complained, ‘I’ve been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember.’
‘Don’t look at me,’ Daisy retorted, ‘I’ve been trying to get you to New York all afternoon.’
‘No, thanks,’ said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry, ‘I’m absolutely in training.’
Her host looked at her incredulously.
‘You are!’ He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. ‘How you ever get anything done is beyond me.’
I looked at Miss Baker, wondering what it was she ‘got done’. I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming, discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before.
‘You live in West Egg,’ she remarked contemptuously. ‘I know somebody there.’
‘I don’t know a single —’
‘You must know Gatsby.’
‘Gatsby?’ demanded Daisy. ‘What Gatsby?’
Before I could reply that he was my neighbour dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine, Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.
Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips, the two young women preceded us out on to a rosy-coloured porch, open toward the sunset, where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind.
‘Why
