LITMIR.BIZ

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it’s light enough after dinner, I want to take you down to the stables.”

      The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at every one, and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn’t guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking, but I doubt if even Miss Baker, who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy skepticism, was able utterly to put this fifth guest’s shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing – my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police.

      The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss Baker, with several feet of twilight between them, strolled back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while, trying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf, I followed Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. In its deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee.

      Daisy took her face in her hands as if feeling its lovely shape, and her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl.

      “We don’t know each other very well, Nick,” she said suddenly. “Even if we are cousins. You didn’t come to my wedding.”

      “I wasn’t back from the war.”

      “That’s true.” She hesitated. “Well, I’ve had a very bad time. Nick, and I’m pretty cynical about everything.”

      Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn’t say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter.

      “I suppose she talks, and – eats, and everything.”

      “Oh, yes.” She looked at me absently. “Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?”

      “Very much.”

      “It’ll show you how I’ve gotten to feel about – things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’ ”

      “You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow,” she went on in a convinced way. “Everybody thinks so – the most advanced people. And I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.” Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom’s, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. “Sophisticated – God, I’m sophisticated!”

      The instant her voice broke off ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face, as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.

      Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light. Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the long couch and she read aloud to him from The Saturday Evening Post – the words, murmurous and uninflected, running together in a soothing tune. The lamp-light, bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms.

      When we came in she held us silent for a moment with a lifted hand.

      “To be continued,” she said, tossing the magazine on the table, “in our very next issue.”

      Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she stood up.

      “Ten o’clock,” she remarked, apparently finding the time on the ceiling. “Time for this good girl to go to bed.”

      “Jordan’s going to play in the tournament tomorrow,” explained Daisy, “over at Westchester.”

      “Oh – you’re Jordan Baker.”

      I knew now why her face was familiar – its pleasing contemptuous expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long ago.

      “Good night,” she said softly. “Wake me at eight, won’t you?”

      “If you’ll get up.”

      “I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon.”

      “Of course you will,” confirmed Daisy. “In fact, I think I’ll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I’ll sort of – oh – fling you together. You know – lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing – ”

      “Good night,” called Miss Baker from the stairs. “I haven’t heard a word.”

      “She’s a nice girl,” said Tom after a moment. “They oughtn’t to let her run around the country this way.”

      “Who oughtn’t to?” inquired Daisy coldly.

      “Her family.”

      “Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Nick’s going to look after her, aren’t you, Nick? She’s going to spend lots of week-ends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be very good for her.”

      Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment in silence.

      “Is she from New York?” I asked quickly.

      “From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our beautiful white – ”

      “Did you give Nick a little heart-to-heart talk on the veranda?” demanded Tom suddenly.

      “Did I?” She looked at me. “I can’t seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I’m sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and first thing you know – ”

      “Don’t believe everything you hear, Nick,” he advised me.

      I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes later I got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood side by side in a cheerful square of light. As I started my motor Daisy peremptorily called: “Wait! I forgot to ask you something, and it’s important. We heard you were engaged to a girl out West.”

      “That’s right,” corroborated Tom kindly. “We heard that you were engaged.”

      “It’s a libel. I’m too poor.”

      “But we heard it,” insisted Daisy, surprising me by opening up again’ in a flower-like way. “We heard it from three people, so it must be true.”

      Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn’t even vaguely engaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns was one of the reasons I had come East. You can’t stop going with an old friend on account of rumors, and on the other hand I had no intention of being rumored into marriage.

      Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely rich – nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms – but apparently there were no such intentions in her head. As for Tom, the fact that he “had some woman in New York” was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.

      Already it was deep summer on road-house roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat

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