[Music] the great gatsby chapter 4 on sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages along the shore the world and its mistresses returned to gatsby's house and twinkled hilariously on his lawn he's a bootlegger said the young ladies moving somewhere between his cocktails and his flowers one time he killed a man who found out that he was the nephew to von hindenburg and the second cousin of the devil reach me arose honey and pour me a last drop into that there crystal glass once i wrote down on the empty spaces of a timetable the names of those who came to gatsby's house that summer it is an old timetable now disintegrating in 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 gaspi's hospitality and paid him subtle tribute of knowing nothing whatever about him from east egg then came the chesterbeckers and the leeches and a man named bunsen whom i knew at yale and dr webster sivit who was drowned last summer up in maine and the hornbeams and the willy voltaires and a whole clan named blackbuck who always gathered in a corner and flipped up their noses like goats at whoever came near the ismays and the christies or rather hubert alback and mr christie's wife and edgar beaver whose hair they said turned cotton white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all clarence ondive was from east egg as i remember he came only once in white knickerbockers and had a fight with a bum named eddie in the garden from farther out on the island came the cheatles and the orp schraders and the stonewalled jackson abrams of georgia and the fish guards and the ripley snells snell was there three days before he went into the penitentiary so drunk out on the gravel drive that mrs ulysses sweat's automobile ran over his right hand the dances came to an sb whitebait who was well over 60 and maurice a flink and the hammerheads and the beluga the tobacco importer and the belugas girls from west egg came the poles and the mole reddies and cecil roebuck and cecil shone and googlick the state senator and newton orchid who controlled films par excellence an ecost and clyde cohen and donis schwartz the son and arthur mccarthy all connected with the movies in one way or another and the cat lips and the bembergs and geo mulden brother to that mullin who afterwards strangled his wife de defonso the promoter came there and ed legross and james b rotgut ferret and the de youngs and ernest lilly they came to gamble and when ferret wandered into the garden it meant that he was cleaned out and associated transaction would have to fluctuate profitably next day a man named clip springer was there so often and so long that he became known as the border i doubt if he had any other home of theatrical people there were gus ways and horace o'donovan and lester mayer and george duckweed and francis bull also from new york there were the chromes and the back hissings and the denikers and russell betty and the corrigans and the kellers and the dwarves and the sullies and the sw belker and the smirks and the young twins divorced now and henry l pimetto who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in times square benny mclennan arrived always with four girls they were never quite the same ones in physical person but they were so identical with another that it seemed they had been there before i've forgotten their names jaclyn i think or or else concealer or gloria or judy or june and their last names were either the melodious names of flowers and months or the sterner ones of great american capitalists whose cousins if pressed they would confess themselves to be in addition to all these i can remember that faustina o'brien came there at least once and the bay decker girls and young brewer who had his nose shut off in the war and mr al struckersburger and miss hague his fiancee and our deiter fitzpeters and mr p jewett once head of the american legion and miss claudia hip with a man reputed to be her chauffeur and a prince of something whom we called duke and whose name if i ever knew it i've forgotten all these people came to gatsby's house in the summer at nine o'clock one morning in late july gatsby's gorgeous car lurched up the rocky drive to my door and gave out a burst of melody from its three noted horn it was the first time he had called on me though i had gone to two of his parties mounted his hydroplane and at his urgent invitation made frequent use of his beach good morning old sport you're having lunch with me today and i thought we'd ride up together he was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly american that comes i suppose with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in youth and even more with the formless grace of our nervous sporadic games this quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape of restlessness he was never quite still there was always a tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand he saw me looking with admiration at his car it's pretty isn't it all sport he jumped off to give me a better view haven't you ever seen it before i'd seen it everybody had seen it it was a rich cream color bright with nickel swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hat boxes and supper boxes and tool boxes and terraced with a labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory we started to town i had talked with him perhaps half a dozen times in the past month and found to my disappointment that he had little to say so my first impression that he was a person of some undefined consequence had gradually faded and he had become simply the proprietor of an elaborate roadhouse next door and then came that disconcerting ride we hadn't reached west egg village before gatsby began leaving his elegant sentences unfinished and slapping himself indecisively on the knee of his caramel colored suit look here old sport he broke out surprisingly what's your opinion of me anyhow a little overwhelmed i began the generalized evasions which that question deserves well i'm going to tell you something about my life he interrupted i don't want you to get the wrong idea of me from all these stories you hear so he was aware of the bizarre accusations that flavored conversation in his halls i'll tell you god's truth his right hand suddenly ordered divine retribution to stand by i am the son of some wealthy people in the middle west all dead now i was brought up in america but educated at oxford because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years it is a family tradition he looked at me sideways and i knew why jordan baker had believed he was lying he hurried the phrase educated at oxford or swallowed it or choked on it as though it had bothered him before and with this doubt his whole statement fell to pieces and i wondered if there wasn't something a little sinister about him after all what part of the middle west i inquired casually san francisco i see my family all died and i came into a good deal of money his voice was solemn as if the memory of all that sudden extension of a clan still haunted him for a moment i suspected that he was pulling my leg but i glanced at him convinced me otherwise after that i lived like a young raja in all the capitals of europe paris venice rome collecting jewels chiefly rubies hunting big game painting a little things for myself only and trying to forget something very sad that happened to me long ago with an effort i managed to restrain my incredulous laughter the very phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that over turbulent character leaking sawdust out of every pore as he pursued a tiger through the boulon then came the war of sport it was a great relief and i tried very hard to die but i seemed to bear an enchanted life i accepted a commission as first lieutenant when it began in the argonne forest i took two machine gun detachments so far forward that there was a half a mile gap on either side of us where the infantry couldn't advance we stayed there two days and two nights 130 men with 16 lewis guns and when the infantry came up at last they found the insignia of three german divisions among the piles of dead i was permitted to be major and every aligned government gave me a decoration even montenegro little montenegro down in the adriatic sea little montenegro he lifted up the words and nodded at them with a smile the smile comprehended montenegro's troubled history and sympathized with the brave struggles of the montenegrin people it appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances which had elicited this tribute from montenegro's warm little heart my incredulity was submerged in fascination now it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines he reached in his pocket and a piece of metal slung on a ribbon fell into my palm that's the one from montenegro to my astonishment the thing had an authentic look oh dairy d danilo ran the circular legend montenegro nicolas rex turn it major jay gatsby i read for valor extraordinary here's another thing i always carry a souvenir of oxford days it was taken in trinity quad the man on my left is now earl of door caster it was a photograph of half a dozen young men in blazers loafing in an archway through which were visible a host of spires there was gaspy looking a little not much younger with a cricket bat in his hand then it was all true i saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace on the grand canal i saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease with their crimson lighted depths the gnarings of his broken heart i'm going to make a big request of you today he said pocketing his souvenirs with satisfaction so i thought you ought to know something about me i didn't want you to think i was just some nobody you see i usually find myself among strangers because i drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happens to me he hesitated you'll hear about it this afternoon at lunch no this afternoon i happen to find out that you're taking miss baker to tea do you mean you're in love with miss baker no old sport i'm not but miss baker has kindly consented to speak to you about this matter i hadn't the faintest idea of what this matter was but i was more annoyed than interested i hadn't asked jordan to t in order to discuss jay gatsby i was sure the request would be something utterly fantastic and for a moment i was sorry i'd ever set foot upon his overpopulated lawn he wouldn't say another word his correctness grew on him as we neared the city we passed port roosevelt where there was a glimpse of red-belted ocean-going ships and sped along a cobbled slum lined with the dark undeserted saloons of the faded guilt of the 1900s then the valley of ashes opened out on both sides of us and i had a glimpse of mrs wilson straining at the garage pump with painting vitality as we went by with fenders spread like wings we scattered light through half astoria only half for us we twisted among the pillars of the elevated i heard the familiar jug spat of a motorcycle and a frantic policeman rode alongside all right oh sport called gatsby we slowed down taking a white card from his wallet he waved it before the man's eyes right you are agreed the policeman tipping his cap know you next time mr gatsby excuse me what was that i inquired the picture of oxford i was able to do the commissioner a favor once and he sends me a christmas card every year over the great bridge with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars with the city rising up the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-old factory money the city seen from the queensborough bridge is always the city seen for the first time in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world a dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms followed by two carriages with drawn blinds and by more cheerful carriages for friends the friends looked out at us with the tragic eyes and the short upper lips of the southern eastern europe and i was glad that the sight of gatsby's splendid car was included in their somber holiday as we crossed blackwell's island a limousine passed us driven by a white chauffeur in which sat three modest negroes two bucks and a girl i laughed loud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled towards us in haughty rivalry anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge i thought anything at all even gatsby could happen without any particular wonder roaring noon in a well-fanned 42nd street cellar i met gatsby for lunch blinking away the brightness of the street outside my eyes picked him out obscurely in the afternoon talking to another man mr carraway this is my friend mr wolsheim a small flat-nosed jew raised his large head and regarded me with two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril after a moment i discovered his tiny eyes in the half darkness so i took one look at him said wolfsheim shaking my hand earnestly and what do you think i did what i inquired politely but evidently he was not addressing me for he dropped my hand and covered gatsby with his expressive nose i handed the money to casper and i said all right caspar don't pay him a penny till he shuts his mouth he shot it there and then eyeballs asked to the headwaiter this is a nice restaurant here said wolfsheim looking at the presbyterian nymphs on the ceiling but i like across the street better yes high balls agreed gatsby and then to mr wolsheim it's too hot over there hot and small yes said mr wolfsheim but full of memories what place is that i asked the old metropole the old metropole brooded mr walsheim gloomily filled with faces dead and gone filled with friends gone now forever i can't forget so long as i live the night they shot rosie rosenthal there it was six of us at a table and rosie had eaten drunk a lot all evening when it was almost morning the waiter came up to him with a funny look and says somebody wants to speak to him outside all right says rosie and begins to get up and i pulled him down in his chair let the bastards come in here if they want you rosie but don't you so help me move out of this room it was four o'clock in the morning and if we raise the blinds we'd have seen daylight did he go i asked innocently sure he went mr wolfsheim's nose flashed me indignantly he turned around in the door and says don't let that waiter take away my coffee and then he went out on the sidewalk and they shot him three times in his full belly and drove away four of them were electrocuted i said remembering five with becca his nostrils turned to me in an interested way i understand you're looking for a business connection the juxtaposition of these two remarks was startling gatsby answered for me oh no he exclaimed this isn't the man no mr wolshaim seemed disappointed this is just a friend i told you we'd talk about that some other time i beg your pardon said mr wolfsheim i had a wrong man a succulent hash arrived and mr walsheim forgetting the more sentimental atmosphere of the old metropole began to eat with ferocious delicacy his eyes meanwhile roved very slowly all around the room he completed the ark by turning to inspect the people directly behind i think that except for my presence he would have taken one short glance beneath our table look here old sport said gatsby leaning towards me i'm afraid i made you a little angry this morning in the car there was a smile again but this time i held out against it i don't like mysteries i answered and i don't understand why you won't come out frankly and tell me what you want why is it all got to come through miss baker oh it's nothing underhand he assured me miss baker's a great sports woman you know and she'd never do anything that wasn't all right suddenly he looked at his watch jumped up and hurried from the room leaving me with mr wulsheim at the table he has to telephone said mr wolsheim following him with his eyes fine fella isn't he handsome to look at and a perfect gentleman yes he's an oxford man oh he went to oxford college in england you know oxford college i've heard of it one of the most famous colleges in the world have you known gaspy for a long time i inquired several years he answered in a gratified way i made the pleasure of his acquaintance just after the war but i knew i discovered a man of fine breeding after i talked with him for an hour i said to myself that's the kind of man you'd like to take home and introduce to your mother and your sister he paused i see you're looking at my cuff buttons i hadn't been looking at them but i did now they were composed of oddly familiar pieces of ivory finest specimens of human moles he informed me well i inspected them that's a very interesting idea yeah he flipped his sleeve up under his coat yeah gatsby's very careful about women he would never so much look at a friend's wife when the subject of this instinctive trust returned to the table and sat down mr wolshan drank his coffee with a jerk and got to his feet i have enjoyed my lunch he said and i'm going to run off from you two young men before i outstay my welcome don't hurry maya said gaspy without enthusiasm mr wolshaim raised his hand in a sort of benediction you're very polite but i belong to another generation he announced solemnly you sit here and discuss your sports and your young ladies and your he supplied an imaginary noun with another wave of his hand as for myself i am 50 years old and i will not impose myself on you any longer as he shook hands and turned away his tragic nose was trembling i wondered if i had said anything to offend him he becomes very sentimental sometimes explained to gatsby this is one of his sentimental days he's quite a character around new york a denizen of broadway who is he anyhow an actor no a dentist mayor wolfsheim no he's a gambler gaspi hesitated and then added coolly he's the man who fixed the world series back in 1990. fix the world series i repeat it the idea staggered me i remembered of course that the world series had been fixed in 1919 but if i had thought of it at all i would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened the end of some inevitable chain it never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of 50 million people with a single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe how did he happen to do that i asked after a minute he just sold the opportunity why isn't he in jail they can't get him old sport he's a smart man i insisted on paying the check as the waiter brought my change i caught sight of tom buchanan across the crowded room come along with me for a minute i said i've got to say hello to someone when he saw us tom jumped up and took half a dozen steps in our direction where have you been he demanded eagerly daisy's furious because you haven't called up this is mr gaspi mr buchanan they shook hands briefly and a strained unfamiliar look of embarrassment came over gatsby's face how have you been anyhow demanded tom of me how'd you happen to come up this far to eat i've been having lunch with mr gaspi i turned towards mr gaspi but he was no longer there one october day in 1917 said jordan baker that afternoon sitting up very straight on a straight chair in the tea garden at the plaza hotel i was walking along from one place to another half on the sidewalk and half on the lawn i was happier on the lawn because i had shoes from england with rubber knobs on the soles that bit into the soft ground i had on a new plaid skirt that blew a little in the wind and whenever this happened the red white and blue banners in front of the houses stretched out stiff and said tut tut tut in a disapproving way the largest of the banners and the largest of the lawns belonged to daisy fay's house she was just 18 2 years older than me and by far the most popular of all of the young girls in lewisville 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 monopolizing her that night anyways for an hour when i came opposite her house that morning her white roadster was besides the curb and she was sitting in it with a lieutenant i had never seen before they were so engrossed in each other that they 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 other 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 met him on long island i didn't realize it was the same man that was 1917. by the next year i had a few bow 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 rumors were circulating about her how her mother had found her packing a bag one winter night to go to new york and say goodbye 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 anymore 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 debut after the armistice 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 had ever known he came down with a hundred people in four private cars and hired a whole floor of the seal back hotel and the day before the wedding he gave her a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars i was a bridesmaid i came into her room half an hour before the bridal dinner and found her lying on the bed as lovely as the june night in her flowered dress and as drunk as a monkey she had a bottle of sorting in one hand and a letter in the other congratulate me she muttered never had a drink before but oh how i enjoy it what's the matter daisy here dearies she groped around in a waste basket she had with her on the bed and pulled out the string of pearls take him downstairs and give him back to whoever they belong to tell him daisy changed her mind say daisy change her mind she began to cry she cried and cried i rushed out 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 wasn't 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-month 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 round uneasily and say where's tom gone and were the most abstracted expressions until she saw him coming in the door she used to sit in the sand with her head in her lap by the hour rubbing her fingers over his eyes and looking at him with unfathomable delight it was touching 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 wagon on the ventura road one night and ripped the 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 can and later in deville 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 blind and that they don't see or care perhaps daisy never went in for no more 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 the 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 50s and the clear voices of girls already gathering like crickets on the grass rose through the hot twilight i'm the sheikh of arabi your love belongs to me at night when you're 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 aspired on that june night he came alive to me he delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor he wants to know continue jordan if you'll invite daisy to your house some afternoon and then let him come over the modesty of the demand shook me he had waited five years and bought a mansion where he'd dispense 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 underneath 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 expects her to wander into one of his parties some night when on jordan but she never did then he began asking people casually 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 luncheon 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're a particular friend of toms 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 on the chance of catching 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 towards me and asked her to dinner suddenly i wasn't thinking of daisy and gatsby anymore but of this clean hard limited person who dealt in universal skepticism and who leaned back gently just within the circle of my arm a phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement there are only pursued the pursuing the busy and the tired and daisy ought to have something in her life remember jordan to me does she want to see gatsby she's not to know anything about it gaspi 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 facade of 59th 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 drove the girl beside me tightening my arms her when scornful mouth smiled and so i drew her up again closer this time to my face and that is another chapter completed thank you so very much for listening if you enjoyed please do like comment subscribe all that jazz uh the next chapter shall be coming out next wednesday and um thank you very much again and until next time bye