door. When he had gone halfway he turned around and stared at the
scene—his wife and Catherine scolding and consoling as they stumbled
here and there among the crowded furniture with articles of aid, and
the despairing figure on the couch, bleeding fluently, and trying to
spread a copy of Town Tattle over the tapestry scenes of
Versailles. Then Mr. McKee turned and continued on out the door.
Taking my hat from the chandelier, I followed.“Come to lunch some day,” he suggested, as we groaned down in the elevator. “Where?” “Anywhere.” “Keep your hands off the lever,” snapped the elevator boy. “I beg your pardon,” said Mr. McKee with dignity, “I didn’t know I was touching it.” “All right,” I agreed, “I’ll be glad to.”… I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands. “Beauty and the Beast … Loneliness … Old Grocery Horse … Brook’n Bridge …” Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station, staring at the morning Tribune, and waiting for the four o’clock train.

There was music from my neighbour’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motorboats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On weekends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before. Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York—every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb. At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough coloured lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby’s enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female 

 Prev. P 23/132 next