Frensis Skott Ficzheral'd. Velikij Getsbi (engl)
F.Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby
Chapter 1 In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me
some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you
feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the
people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." He didn't
say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved
way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In
consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened
up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few
veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to
this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that
in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy
to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were
unsought--frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile
levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation
was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or
at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and
marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite
hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as
my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the
fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth. And, after
boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a
limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after
a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the
East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a
sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with
privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his
name to this book, was exempt from my reaction--Gatsby, who represented
everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an
unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous
about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he
were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes
ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that
flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative
temperament."--it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness
such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I
shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is
what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that
temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded
elations of men. My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this
Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a
clan, and we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of
Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother,
who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started
the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on to-day. I never
saw this great-uncle, but I'm supposed to look like him--with special
reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father's office I
graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my
father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration
known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came
back restless. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle
West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe--so I decided to go
East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business,
so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles
talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally
said, "Why--ye--es," with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to
finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I
thought, in the spring of twenty-two. The practical thing was to find rooms
in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide
lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that
we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea.
He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month,
but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to
the country alone. I had a dog--at least I had him for a few days until he
ran away--and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked
breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove. It
was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived
than I, stopped me on the road. "How do you get to West Egg village?" he
asked helplessly. I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I
was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on
me the freedom of the neighborhood. And so with the sunshine and the great
bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I
had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the
summer. There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to
be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes
on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf
in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the
shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the
high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in
college--one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for
the "Yale News."--and now I was going to bring back all such things into my
life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the
"well-rounded man." This isn't just an epigram--life is much more
successfully looked at from a single window, after all. It was a matter of
chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities
in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself
due east of New York--and where there are, among other natural curiosities,
two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of
enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay,
jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western
hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. they are not
perfect ovals--like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed
flat at the contact end--but their physical resemblance must be a source of
perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. to the wingless a more
arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape
and size. I lived at West Egg, the--well, the less fashionable of the two,
though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a
little sinister contrast between them. my house was at the very tip of the
egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places
that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. the one on my right was
a colossal affair by any standard--it was a factual imitation of some Hotel
de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin
beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of
lawn and garden. it was Gatsby's mansion. Or, rather, as I didn't know Mr.
Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house
was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I
had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the
consoling proximity of millionaires--all for eighty dollars a month. Across
the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along
the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I
drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second
cousin once removed, and I'd known Tom in college. And just after the war I
spent two days with them in Chicago. Her husband, among various physical
accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played
football at New Haven--a national figure in a way, one of those men who
reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything
afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy--even in
college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach--but now he'd left
Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for
instance, he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. it was
hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do
that. Why they came East I don't know. They had spent a year in France for
no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever
people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said
Daisy over the telephone, but I didn't believe it--I had no sight into
Daisy's heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little
wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.
And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to
see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more
elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial
mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward
the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick
walks and burning gardens--finally when it reached the house drifting up the
side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was
broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide
open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was
standing with his legs apart on the front porch. He had changed since his
New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a
rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had
established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always
leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding
clothes could hide the enormous power of that body--he seemed to fill those
glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great
pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was
a body capable of enormous leverage--a cruel body. His speaking voice, a
gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed.
There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he
liked--and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts. "Now, don't
think my opinion on these matters is final," he seemed to say, "just because
I'm stronger and more of a man than you are." We were in the same senior
society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that
he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant
wistfulness of his own. We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.
"I've got a nice place here," he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.
Turning me around by one arm, he moved a broad flat hand along the front
vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep,
pungent roses, and a snub-nosed motor-boat that bumped the tide offshore.
"It belonged to Demaine, the oil man." He turned me around again, politely
and abruptly. "We'll go inside." We walked through a high hallway into a
bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows
at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh
grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew
through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale
flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and
then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does
on the sea. The only completely stationary object in the room was an
enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an
anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling
and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight
around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip
and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there
was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died
out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women
ballooned slowly to the floor. The younger of the two was a stranger to me.
She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless,
and with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it
which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes
she gave no hint of it--indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an
apology for having disturbed her by coming in. The other girl, Daisy, made
an attempt to rise--she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious
expression--then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I
laughed too and came forward into the room. "I'm p-paralyzed with
happiness." She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held
my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no
one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She
hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I've
heard it said that Daisy's murmur was only to make people lean toward her;
an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.) At any rate, Miss
Baker's lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly, and then
quickly tipped her head back again--the object she was balancing had
obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a
sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete
self-sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me. I looked back at my
cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was
the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an
arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and
lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth,
but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her
found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a
promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that
there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour. 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. To-morrow!" 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 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 gray 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
neighbor 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 onto a rosy-colored porch,
open toward the sunset, where four candles flickered on the table in the
diminished wind. "Why CANDLES?" objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them
out with her fingers. "In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year."
She looked at us all radiantly. "Do you always watch for the longest day of
the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year
and then miss it." "We ought to plan something," yawned Miss Baker, sitting
down at the table as if she were getting into bed. "All right," said Daisy.
"What'll we plan?" She turned to me helplessly: "What do people plan?"
Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her
little finger. "Look!" she complained; "I hurt it." We all looked--the
knuckle was black and blue. "You did it, Tom," she said accusingly. "I know
you didn't mean to, but you DID do it. That's what I get for marrying a
brute of a man, a great, big, hulking physical specimen of a----" "I hate
that word hulking," objected Tom crossly, "even in kidding." "Hulking,"
insisted Daisy. Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively
and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as
cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all
desire. They were here, and they accepted Tom and me, making only a polite
pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that presently
dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and
casually put away. It was sharply different from the West, where an evening
was hurried from phase to phase toward its close, in a continually
disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment
itself. "You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy," I confessed on my second
glass of corky but rather impressive claret. "Can't you talk about crops or
something?" I meant nothing in particular by this remark, but it was taken
up in an unexpected way. "Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom
violently. "I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you
read 'The Rise of the Colored Empires' by this man Goddard?" "Why, no," I
answered, rather surprised by his tone. "Well, it's a fine book, and
everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race
will be--will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been
proved." "Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy, with an expression of
unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them. What was
that word we----" "Well, these books are all scientific," insisted Tom,
glancing at her impatiently. "This fellow has worked out the whole thing.
It's up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races
will have control of things." "We've got to beat them down," whispered
Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun. "You ought to live in
California--" began Miss Baker, but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily
in his chair. "This idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are, and you
are, and----" After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a
slight nod, and she winked at me again. "--And we've produced all the things
that go to make civilization--oh, science and art, and all that. Do you
see?" There was something pathetic in his concentration, as if his
complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more. When,
almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch
Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned toward me. "I'll
tell you a family secret," she whispered enthusiastically. "It's about the
butler's nose. Do you want to hear about the butler's nose?" "That's why I
came over to-night." "Well, he wasn't always a butler; he used to be the
silver polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service for
two hundred people. He had to polish it from morning till night, until
finally it began to affect his nose----" "Things went from bad to worse,"
suggested Miss Baker. "Yes. Things went from bad to worse, until finally he
had to give up his position." For a moment the last sunshine fell with
romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward
breathlessly as I listened--then the glow faded, each light deserting her
with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk. The
butler came back and murmured something close to Tom's ear, whereupon Tom
frowned, pushed back his chair, and without a word went inside. As if his
absence quickened something within her, Daisy leaned forward again, her
voice glowing and singing. "I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind
me of a--of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn't he?" She turned to Miss Baker
for confirmation: "An absolute rose?" This was untrue. I am not even faintly
like a rose. She was only extemporizing, but a stirring warmth flowed from
her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those
breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table
and excused herself and went into the house. Miss Baker and I exchanged a
short glance consciously devoid of meaning. I was about to speak when she
sat up alertly and said "Sh!" in a warning voice. A subdued impassioned
murmur was audible in the room beyond, and Miss Baker leaned forward
unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence,
sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether. "This Mr. Gatsby
you spoke of is my neighbor----" I said. "Don't talk. I want to hear what
happens." "Is something happening?" I inquired innocently. "You mean to say
you don't know?" said Miss Baker, honestly surprised. "I thought everybody
knew." "I don't." "Why----" she said hesitantly, "Tom's got some woman in
New York." "Got some woman?" I repeated blankly. Miss Baker nodded. "She
might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner time. Don't you
think?" Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a
dress and the crunch of leather boots, and Tom and Daisy were back at the
table. "It couldn't be helped!" cried Daisy with tense gaiety. She sat down,
glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me, and continued: "I looked
outdoors for a minute, and it's very romantic outdoors. There's a bird on
the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White
Star Line. He's singing away----" Her voice sang: "It's romantic, isn't it,
Tom?" "Very romantic," he said, and then miserably to me: "If 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 scepticism, 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
to-morrow," 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 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 roadhouse 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 for a while on an abandoned
grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright
night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the
full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a
moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and turning my head to watch it, I
saw that I was not alone--fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the
shadow of my neighbor's mansion and was standing with his hands in his
pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely
movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that
it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our
local heavens. I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at
dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn't call to him, for
he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone--he stretched
out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from
him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced
seaward--and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and
far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more
for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.
Chapter 2 About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road
hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as
to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of
ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills
and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and
rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly
and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray
cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes
to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and
stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from
your sight. But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift
endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J.
Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic--their
irises are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a
pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose.
Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice
in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness,
or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many
paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and, when
the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains
can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a
halt there of at least a minute, and it was because of this that I first met
Tom Buchanan's mistress. The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever
he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in
popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about,
chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her, I had no
desire to meet her--but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train
one afternoon, and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet
and, taking hold of my elbow, literally forced me from the car. "We're
getting off," he insisted. "I want you to meet my girl." I think he'd tanked
up a good deal at luncheon, and his determination to have my company
bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday
afternoon I had nothing better to do. I followed him over a low whitewashed
railroad fence, and we walked back a hundred yards along the road under
Doctor Eckleburg's persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small
block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of
compact Main Street ministering to it, and contiguous to absolutely nothing.
One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an
all-night restaurant, approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a
garage--Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars bought and sold.--and I followed Tom
inside. The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the
dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred
to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind, and that sumptuous and
romantic apartments were concealed overhead, when the proprietor himself
appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He
was a blond, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a
damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes. "Hello, Wilson, old
man," said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. "How's business?" "I
can't complain," answered Wilson unconvincingly. "When are you going to sell
me that car?" "Next week; I've got my man working on it now." "Works pretty
slow, don't he?" "No, he doesn't," said Tom coldly. "And if you feel that
way about it, maybe I'd better sell it somewhere else after all." "I don't
mean that," explained Wilson quickly. "I just meant----" His voice faded off
and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage. Then I heard footsteps on a
stairs, and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light
from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but
she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above
a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of
beauty, but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if
the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and,
walking through her husband as if he were a ghost, shook hands with Tom,
looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips, and without turning
around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: "Get some chairs, why
don't you, so somebody can sit down." "Oh, sure," agreed Wilson hurriedly,
and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement
color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale
hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity--except his wife, who moved
close to Tom. "I want to see you," said Tom intently. "Get on the next
train." "All right." "I'll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level."
She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two
chairs from his office door. We waited for her down the road and out of
sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a gray, scrawny
Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row along the railroad track.
"Terrible place, isn't it," said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor
Eckleburg. "Awful." "It does her good to get away." "Doesn't her husband
object?" "Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so
dumb he doesn't know he's alive." So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up
together to New York--or not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly
in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East
Eggers who might be on the train. She had changed her dress to a brown
figured muslin, which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom
helped her to the platform in New York. At the news-stand she bought a copy
of TOWN TATTLE. and a moving-picture magazine, and in the station drug-store
some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Up-stairs, in the solemn
echoing drive she let four taxicabs drive away before she selected a new
one, lavender-colored with gray upholstery, and in this we slid out from the
mass of the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she turned
sharply from the window and, leaning forward, tapped on the front glass. "I
want to get one of those dogs," she said earnestly. "I want to get one for
the apartment. They're nice to have--a dog." We backed up to a gray old man
who bore an absurd resemblance to John D. Rockefeller. In a basket swung
from his neck cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an indeterminate breed.
"What kind are they?" asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly, as he came to the
taxi-window. "All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?" "I'd like to get one
of those police dogs; I don't suppose you got that kind?" The man peered
doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling,
by the back of the neck. "That's no police dog," said Tom. "No, it's not
exactly a polICE dog," said the man with disappointment in his voice. "It's
more of an Airedale." He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back.
"Look at that coat. Some coat. That's a dog that'll never bother you with
catching cold." "I think it's cute," said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. "How
much is it?" "That dog?" He looked at it admiringly. "That dog will cost you
ten dollars." The Airedale--undoubtedly there was an Airedale concerned in
it somewhere, though its feet were startlingly white--changed hands and
settled down into Mrs. Wilson's lap, where she fondled the weather-proof
coat with rapture. "Is it a boy or a girl?" she asked delicately. "That dog?
That dog's a boy." "It's a bitch," said Tom decisively. "Here's your money.
Go and buy ten more dogs with it." We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm
and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn't
have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner.
"Hold on," I said, "I have to leave you here." "No, you don't," interposed
Tom quickly. "Myrtle'll be hurt if you don't come up to the apartment. Won't
you, Myrtle?" "Come on," she urged. "I'll telephone my sister Catherine.
She's said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know." "Well, I'd
like to, but----" We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the
West Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white
cake of apartment-houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the
neighborhood, Mrs. Wilson gathered up her dog and her other purchases, and
went haughtily in. "I'm going to have the McKees come up," she announced as
we rose in the elevator. "And, of course, I got to call up my sister, too."
The apartment was on the top floor--a small living-room, a small
dining-room, a small bedroom, and a bath. The living-room was crowded to the
doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it, so that
to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in
the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph,
apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance,
however, the hen resolved itself into a bonnet, and the countenance of a
stout old lady beamed down into the room. Several old copies of TOWN TATTLE.
lay on the table together with a copy of SIMON CALLED PETER, and some of the
small scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with
the dog. A reluctant elevator-boy went for a box full of straw and some
milk, to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large, hard
dog-biscuits--one of which decomposed apathetically in the saucer of milk
all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked
bureau door. I have been drunk just twice in my life, and the second time
was that afternoon; so everything that happened has a dim, hazy cast over
it, although until after eight o'clock the apartment was full of cheerful
sun. Sitting on Tom's lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the
telephone; then there were no cigarettes, and I went out to buy some at the
drugstore on the corner. When I came back they had disappeared, so I sat
down discreetly in the living-room and read a chapter of SIMON CALLED
PETER.--either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things,
because it didn't make any sense to me. Just as Tom and Myrtle (after the
first drink Mrs. Wilson and I called each other by our first names)
reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment-door. The sister,
Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty, with a solid, sticky
bob of red hair, and a complexion powdered milky white. Her eye-brows had
been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle, but the efforts
of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to
her face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as
innumerable pottery bracelets jingled up and down upon her arms. She came in
with such a proprietary haste, and looked around so possessively at the
furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she
laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud, and told me she lived with
a girl friend at a hotel. Mr. McKee was a pale, feminine man from the flat
below. He had just shaved, for there was a white spot of lather on his
cheekbone, and he was most respectful in his greeting to every one in the
room. He informed me that he was in the "artistic game," and I gathered
later that he was a photographer and had made the dim enlargement of Mrs.
Wilson's mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall. His wife was
shrill, languid, handsome, and horrible. She told me with pride that her
husband had photographed her a hundred and twenty-seven times since they had
been married. Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time before, and was
now attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream-colored chiffon, which
gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room. With the influence
of the dress her personality had also undergone a change. The intense
vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into
impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more
violently affected moment by moment, and as she expanded the room grew
smaller around her, until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking
pivot through the smoky air. "My dear," she told her sister in a high,
mincing shout, "most of these fellas will cheat you every time. All they
think of is money. I had a woman up here last week to look at my feet, and
when she gave me the bill you'd of thought she had my appendicitis out."
"What was the name of the woman?" asked Mrs. McKee. "Mrs. Eberhardt. She
goes around looking at people's feet in their own homes." "I like your
dress," remarked Mrs. McKee, "I think it's adorable." Mrs. Wilson rejected
the compliment by raising her eyebrow in disdain. "It's just a crazy old
thing," she said. "I just slip it on sometimes when I don't care what I look
like." "But it looks wonderful on you, if you know what I mean," pursued
Mrs. McKee. "If Chester could only get you in that pose I think he could
make something of it." We all looked in silence at Mrs. Wilson, who removed
a strand of hair from over her eyes and looked back at us with a brilliant
smile. Mr. McKee regarded her intently with his head on one side, and then
moved his hand back and forth slowly in front of his face. "I should change
the light," he said after a moment. "I'd like to bring out the modelling of
the features. And I'd try to get hold of all the back hair." "I wouldn't
think of changing the light," cried Mrs. McKee. "I think it's----" Her
husband said "SH!" and we all looked at the subject again, whereupon Tom
Buchanan yawned audibly and got to his feet. "You McKees have something to
drink," he said. "Get some more ice and mineral water, Myrtle, before
everybody goes to sleep." "I told that boy about the ice." Myrtle raised her
eyebrows in despair at the shiftlessness of the lower orders. "These people!
You have to keep after them all the time." She looked at me and laughed
pointlessly. Then she flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy, and
swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs awaited her orders
there. "I've done some nice things out on Long Island," asserted Mr. McKee.
Tom looked at him blankly. "Two of them we have framed down-stairs." "Two
what?" demanded Tom. "Two studies. One of them I call MONTAUK POINT--THE
GULLS, and the other I call MONTAUK POINT--THE SEA." The sister Catherine
sat down beside me on the couch. "Do you live down on Long Island, too?" she
inquired. "I live at West Egg." "Really? I was down there at a party about a
month ago. At a man named Gatsby's. Do you know him?" "I live next door to
him." "Well, they say he's a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm's. That's
where all his money comes from." "Really?" She nodded. "I'm scared of him.
I'd hate to have him get anything on me." This absorbing information about
my neighbor was interrupted by Mrs. McKee's pointing suddenly at Catherine:
"Chester, I think you could do something with HER," she broke out, but Mr.
McKee only nodded in a bored way, and turned his attention to Tom. "I'd like
to do more work on Long Island, if I could get the entry. All I ask is that
they should give me a start." "Ask Myrtle," said Tom, breaking into a short
shout of laughter as Mrs. Wilson entered with a tray. "She'll give you a
letter of introduction, won't you Myrtle?" "Do what?" she asked, startled.
"You'll give McKee a letter of introduction to your husband, so he can do
some studies of him." His lips moved silently for a moment as he invented.
"GEORGE B. WILSON AT THE GASOLINE PUMP, or something like that." Catherine
leaned close to me and whispered in my ear: "Neither of them can stand the
person they're married to." "Can't they?" "Can't STAND them." She looked at
Myrtle and then at Tom. "What I say is, why go on living with them if they
can't stand them? If I was them I'd get a divorce and get married to each
other right away." "Doesn't she like Wilson either?" The answer to this was
unexpected. It came from Myrtle, who had overheard the question, and it was
violent and obscene. "You see," cried Catherine triumphantly. She lowered
her voice again. "It's really his wife that's keeping them apart. She's a
Catholic, and they don't believe in divorce." Daisy was not a Catholic, and
I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie. "When they do get
married," continued Catherine, "they're going West to live for a while until
it blows over." "It'd be more discreet to go to Europe." "Oh, do you like
Europe?" she exclaimed surprisingly. "I just got back from Monte Carlo."
"Really." "Just last year. I went over there with another girl." "Stay
long?" "No, we just went to Monte Carlo and back. We went by way of
Marseilles. We had over twelve hundred dollars when we started, but we got
gypped out of it all in two days in the private rooms. We had an awful time
getting back, I can tell you. God, how I hated that town!" The late
afternoon sky bloomed in the window for a moment like the blue honey of the
Mediterranean--then the shrill voice of Mrs. McKee called me back into the
room. "I almost made a mistake, too," she declared vigorously. "I almost
married a little kyke who'd been after me for years. I knew he was below me.
Everybody kept saying to me: 'Lucille, that man's 'way below you!' But if I
hadn't met Chester, he'd of got me sure." "Yes, but listen," said Myrtle
Wilson, nodding her head up and down, "at least you didn't marry him." "I
know I didn't." "Well, I married him," said Myrtle, ambiguously. "And that's
the difference between your case and mine." "Why did you, Myrtle?" demanded
Catherine. "Nobody forced you to." Myrtle considered. "I married him because
I thought he was a gentleman," she said finally. "I thought he knew
something about breeding, but he wasn't fit to lick my shoe." "You were
crazy about him for a while," said Catherine. "Crazy about him!" cried
Myrtle incredulously. "Who said I was crazy about him? I never was any more
crazy about him than I was about that man there." She pointed suddenly at
me, and every one looked at me accusingly. I tried to show by my expression
that I had played no part in her past. "The only CRAZY I was was when I
married him. I knew right away I made a mistake. He borrowed somebody's best
suit to get married in, and never even told me about it, and the man came
after it one day when he was out. 'oh, is that your suit?' I said. 'this is
the first I ever heard about it.' But I gave it to him and then I lay down
and cried to beat the band all afternoon." "She really ought to get away
from him," resumed Catherine to me. "They've been living over that garage
for eleven years. And tom's the first sweetie she ever had." The bottle of
whiskey--a second one--was now in constant demand by all present, excepting
Catherine, who "felt just as good on nothing at all." Tom rang for the
janitor and sent him for some celebrated sandwiches, which were a complete
supper in themselves. I wanted to get out and walk southward toward the park
through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in
some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my
chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have
contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the
darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within
and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible
variety of life. Myrtle pulled her chair close to mine, and suddenly her
warm breath poured over me the story of her first meeting with Tom. "It was
on the two little seats facing each other that are always the last ones left
on the train. I was going up to New York to see my sister and spend the
night. He had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes, and I couldn't keep
my eyes off him, but every time he looked at me I had to pretend to be
looking at the advertisement over his head. When we came into the station he
was next to me, and his white shirt-front pressed against my arm, and so I
told him I'd have to call a policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so excited
that when I got into a taxi with him I didn't hardly know I wasn't getting
into a subway train. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You
can't live forever; you can't live forever.'" She turned to Mrs. McKee and
the room rang full of her artificial laughter. "My dear," she cried, "I'm
going to give you this dress as soon as I'm through with it. I've got to get
another one to-morrow. I'm going to make a list of all the things I've got
to get. A massage and a wave, and a collar for the dog, and one of those
cute little ash-trays where you touch a spring, and a wreath with a black
silk bow for mother's grave that'll last all summer. I got to write down a
list so I won't forget all the things I got to do." It was nine
o'clock--almost immediately afterward I looked at my watch and found it was
ten. Mr. McKee was asleep on a chair with his fists clenched in his lap,
like a photograph of a man of action. Taking out my handkerchief I wiped
from his cheek the remains of the spot of dried lather that had worried me
all the afternoon. The little dog was sitting on the table looking with
blind eyes through the smoke, and from time to time groaning faintly. People
disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each
other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away. Some time
toward midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood face to face discussing,
in impassioned voices, whether Mrs. Wilson had any right to mention Daisy's
name. "Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!" shouted Mrs. Wilson. "I'll say it whenever I
want to! Daisy! Dai----" Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke
her nose with his open hand. Then there were bloody towels upon the
bath-room floor, and women's voices scolding, and high over the confusion a
long broken wail of pain. Mr. McKee awoke from his doze and started in a
daze toward the door. When he had gone half way 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.
Chapter 3 There was music from my neighbor'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 motor-boats slit the waters of the
Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends 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 colored 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 guests were too
young to know one from another. By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived,
no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and
saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The
last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing up-stairs;
the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the
halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors, and hair shorn
in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in
full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside,
until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and
introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women
who never knew each other's names. The lights grow brighter as the earth
lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail
music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier
minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word.
The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form
in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave
here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous
moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on
through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly
changing light. Suddenly one of the gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a
cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands
like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the
orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst
of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray's
understudy from the FOLLIES. The party has begun. I believe that on the
first night I went to Gatsby's house I was one of the few guests who had
actually been invited. People were not invited--they went there. They got
into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island, and somehow they ended
up at Gatsby's door. Once there they were introduced by somebody who knew
Gatsby, and after that they conducted themselves according to the rules of
behavior associated with amusement parks. Sometimes they came and went
without having met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of
heart that was its own ticket of admission. I had been actually invited. A
chauffeur in a uniform of robin's-egg blue crossed my lawn early that
Saturday morning with a surprisingly formal note from his employer: the
honor would be entirely Gatsby's, it said, if I would attend his "little
party." that night. He had seen me several times, and had intended to call
on me long before, but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented
it--signed Jay Gatsby, in a majestic hand. Dressed up in white flannels I
went over to his lawn a little after seven, and wandered around rather ill
at ease among swirls and eddies of people I didn't know--though here and
there was a face I had noticed on the commuting train. I was immediately
struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all
looking a little hungry, and all talking in low, earnest voices to solid and
prosperous Americans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or
insurance or automobiles. They were at least agonizingly aware of the easy
money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in
the right key. As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host, but
the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such
an amazed way, and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements, that
I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table--the only place in the
garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and
alone. I was on my way to get roaring drunk from sheer embarrassment when
Jordan Baker came out of the house and stood at the head of the marble
steps, leaning a little backward and looking with contemptuous interest down
into the garden. Welcome or not, I found it necessary to attach myself to
some one before I should begin to address cordial remarks to the passers-by.
"Hello!" I roared, advancing toward her. My voice seemed unnaturally loud
across the garden. "I thought you might be here," she responded absently as
I came up. "I remembered you lived next door to----" She held my hand
impersonally, as a promise that she'd take care of me in a minute, and gave
ear to two girls in twin yellow dresses, who stopped at the foot of the
steps. "Hello!" they cried together. "Sorry you didn't win." That was for
the golf tournament. She had lost in the finals the week before. "You don't
know who we are," said one of the girls in yellow, "but we met you here
about a month ago." "You've dyed your hair since then," remarked Jordan, and
I started, but the girls had moved casually on and her remark was addressed
to the premature moon, produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a
caterer's basket. With Jordan's slender golden arm resting in mine, we
descended the steps and sauntered about the garden. A tray of cocktails
floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a table with the two
girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble. "Do
you come to these parties often?" inquired Jordan of the girl beside her.
"The last one was the one I met you at," answered the girl, in an alert
confident voice. She turned to her companion: "Wasn't it for you, Lucille?"
It was for Lucille, too. "I like to come," Lucille said. "I never care what
I do, so I always have a good time. When I was here last I tore my gown on a
chair, and he asked me my name and address--inside of a week I got a package
from Croirier's with a new evening gown in it." "Did you keep it?" asked
Jordan. "Sure I did. I was going to wear it to-night, but it was too big in
the bust and had to be altered. It was gas blue with lavender beads. Two
hundred and sixty-five dollars." "There's something funny about a fellow
that'll do a thing like that," said the other girl eagerly. "He doesn't want
any trouble with ANYbody." "Who doesn't?" I inquired. "Gatsby. Somebody told
me----" The two girls and Jordan leaned together confidentially. "Somebody
told me they thought he killed a man once." A thrill passed over all of us.
The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and listened eagerly. "I don't think it's
so much THAT," argued Lucille sceptically; "it's more that he was a German
spy during the war." One of the men nodded in confirmation. "I heard that
from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in Germany," he assured
us positively. "Oh, no," said the first girl, "it couldn't be that, because
he was in the American army during the war." As our credulity switched back
to her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. "You look at him sometimes when
he thinks nobody's looking at him. I'll bet he killed a man." She narrowed
her eyes and shivered. Lucille shivered. We all turned and looked around for
Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there
were whispers about him from those who found little that it was necessary to
whisper about in this world. The first supper--there would be another one
after midnight--was now being served, and Jordan invited me to join her own
party, who were spread around a table on the other side of the garden. There
were three married couples and Jordan's escort, a persistent undergraduate
given to violent innuendo, and obviously under the impression that sooner or
later Jordan was going to yield him up her person to a greater or lesser
degree. Instead of rambling, this party had preserved a dignified
homogeneity, and assumed to itself the function of representing the staid
nobility of the country-side--East Egg condescending to West Egg, and
carefully on guard against its spectroscopic gayety. "Let's get out,"
whispered Jordan, after a somehow wasteful and inappropriate half-hour.
"This is much too polite for me." We got up, and she explained that we were
going to find the host: I had never met him, she said, and it was making me
uneasy. The undergraduate nodded in a cynical, melancholy way. The bar,
where we glanced first, was crowded, but Gatsby was not there. She couldn't
find him from the top of the steps, and he wasn't on the veranda. On a
chance we tried an important-looking door, and walked into a high Gothic
library, panelled with carved English oak, and probably transported complete
from some ruin overseas. A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed
spectacles, was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring
with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he
wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot. "What do you
think?" he demanded impetuously. "About what?" He waved his hand toward the
book-shelves. "About that. As a matter of fact you needn't bother to
ascertain. I ascertained. They're real." "The books?" He nodded. "Absolutely
real--have pages and everything. I thought they'd be a nice durable
cardboard. Matter of fact, they're absolutely real. Pages and--Here! Lemme
show you." Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and
returned with Volume One of the "Stoddard Lectures." "See!" he cried
triumphantly. "It's a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This
fella's a regular Belasco. It's a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism!
Knew when to stop, too--didn't cut the pages. But what do you want? What do
you expect?" He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its
shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable
to collapse. "Who brought you?" he demanded. "Or did you just come? I was
brought. Most people were brought." Jordan looked at him alertly,
cheerfully, without answering. "I was brought by a woman named Roosevelt,"
he continued. "Mrs. Claud Roosevelt. Do you know her? I met her somewhere
last night. I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might
sober me up to sit in a library." "Has it?" "A little bit, I think. I can't
tell yet. I've only been here an hour. Did I tell you about the books?
They're real. They're----" "You told us." We shook hands with him gravely
and went back outdoors. There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden;
old men pushing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior
couples holding each other tortuously, fashionably, and keeping in the
corners--and a great number of single girls dancing individualistically or
relieving the orchestra for a moment of the burden of the banjo or the
traps. By midnight the hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor had sung
in Italian, and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz, and between the
numbers people were doing "stunts." all over the garden, while happy,
vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky. A pair of stage
twins, who turned out to be the girls in yellow, did a baby act in costume,
and champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger-bowls. The moon had
risen higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales,
trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawn. I
was still with Jordan Baker. We were sitting at a table with a man of about
my age and a rowdy little girl, who gave way upon the slightest provocation
to uncontrollable laughter. I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two
finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene had changed before my eyes into
something significant, elemental, and profound. At a lull in the
entertainment the man looked at me and smiled. "Your face is familiar," he
said, politely. "Weren't you in the Third Division during the war?" "Why,
yes. I was in the Ninth Machine-gun Battalion." "I was in the Seventh
Infantry until June nineteen-eighteen. I knew I'd seen you somewhere
before." We talked for a moment about some wet, gray little villages in
France. Evidently he lived in this vicinity, for he told me that he had just
bought a hydroplane, and was going to try it out in the morning. "Want to go
with me, old sport? Just near the shore along the Sound." "What time?" "Any
time that suits you best." It was on the tip of my tongue to ask his name
when Jordan looked around and smiled. "Having a gay time now?" she inquired.
"Much better." I turned again to my new acquaintance. "This is an unusual
party for me. I haven't even seen the host. I live over there----" I waved
my hand at the invisible hedge in the distance, "and this man Gatsby sent
over his chauffeur with an invitation." For a moment he looked at me as if
he failed to understand. "I'm Gatsby," he said suddenly. "What!" I
exclaimed. "Oh, I beg your pardon." "I thought you knew, old sport. I'm
afraid I'm not a very good host." He smiled understandingly--much more than
understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal
reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It
faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then
concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It
understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you
as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had
precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.
Precisely at that point it vanished--and I was looking at an elegant young
rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech
just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I'd got a
strong impression that he was picking his words with care. Almost at the
moment when Mr. Gatsby identified himself, a butler hurried toward him with
the information that Chicago was calling him on the wire. He excused himself
with a small bow that included each of us in turn. "If you want anything
just ask for it, old sport," he urged me. "Excuse me. I will rejoin you
later." When he was gone I turned immediately to Jordan--constrained to
assure her of my surprise. I had expected that Mr. Gatsby would be a florid
and corpulent person in his middle years. "Who is he?" I demanded. "Do you
know?" "He's just a man named Gatsby." "Where is he from, I mean? And what
does he do?" "Now YOU'RE started on the subject," she answered with a wan
smile. "Well, he told me once he was an Oxford man." A dim background
started to take shape behind him, but at her next remark it faded away.
"However, I don't believe it." "Why not?" "I don't know," she insisted, "I
just don't think he went there." Something in her tone reminded me of the
other girl's "I think he killed a man," and had the effect of stimulating my
curiosity. I would have accepted without question the information that
Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of
New York. That was comprehensible. But young men didn't--at least in my
provincial inexperience I believed they didn't--drift coolly out of nowhere
and buy a palace on Long Island Sound. "Anyhow, he gives large parties,"
said Jordan, changing the subject with an urbane distaste for the concrete.
"And I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't
any privacy." There was the boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the
orchestra leader rang out suddenly above the echolalia of the garden.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he cried. "At the request of Mr. Gatsby we are going
to play for you Mr. Vladimir Tostoff's latest work, which attracted so much
attention at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the papers, you know there
was a big sensation." He smiled with jovial condescension, and added: "Some
sensation!" Whereupon everybody laughed. "The piece is known," he concluded
lustily, "as Vladimir Tostoff's JAZZ HISTORY OF THE WORLD." The nature of
Mr. Tostoff's composition eluded me, because just as it began my eyes fell
on Gatsby, standing alone on the marble steps and looking from one group to
another with approving eyes. His tanned skin was drawn attractively tight on
his face and his short hair looked as though it were trimmed every day. I
could see nothing sinister about him. I wondered if the fact that he was not
drinking helped to set him off from his guests, for it seemed to me that he
grew more correct as the fraternal hilarity increased. When the JAZZ HISTORY
OF THE WORLD was over, girls were putting their heads on men's shoulders in
a puppyish, convivial way, girls were swooning backward playfully into men's
arms, even into groups, knowing that some one would arrest their falls--but
no one swooned backward on Gatsby, and no French bob touched Gatsby's
shoulder, and no singing quartets were formed with Gatsby's head for one
link. "I beg your pardon." Gatsby's butler was suddenly standing beside us.
"Miss Baker?" he inquired. "I beg your pardon, but Mr. Gatsby would like to
speak to you alone." "With me?" she exclaimed in surprise. "Yes, madame."
She got up slowly, raising her eyebrows at me in astonishment, and followed
the butler toward the house. I noticed that she wore her evening-dress, all
her dresses, like sports clothes--there was a jauntiness about her movements
as if she had first learned to walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp
mornings. I was alone and it was almost two. For some time confused and
intriguing sounds had issued from a long, many-windowed room which overhung
the terrace. Eluding Jordan's undergraduate, who was now engaged in an
obstetrical conversation with two chorus girls, and who implored me to join
him, I went inside. The large room was full of people. One of the girls in
yellow was playing the piano, and beside her stood a tall, red-haired young
lady from a famous chorus, engaged in song. She had drunk a quantity of
champagne, and during the course of her song she had decided, ineptly, that
everything was very, very sad--she was not only singing, she was weeping
too. Whenever there was a pause in the song she filled it with gasping,
broken sobs, and then took up the lyric again in a quavering soprano. The
tears coursed down her cheeks--not freely, however, for when they came into
contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color, and
pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets. A humorous suggestion
was made that she sing the notes on her face, whereupon she threw up her
hands, sank into a chair, and went off into a deep vinous sleep. "She had a
fight with a man who says he's her husband," explained a girl at my elbow. I
looked around. Most of the remaining women were now having fights with men
said to be their husbands. Even Jordan's party, the quartet from East Egg,
were rent asunder by dissension. One of the men was talking with curious
intensity to a young actress, and his wife, after attempting to laugh at the
situation in a dignified and indifferent way, broke down entirely and
resorted to flank attacks--at intervals she appeared suddenly at his side
like an angry diamond, and hissed: "You promised!" into his ear. The
reluctance to go home was not confined to wayward men. The hall was at
present occupied by two deplorably sober men and their highly indignant
wives. The wives were sympathizing with each other in slightly raised
voices. "Whenever he sees I'm having a good time he wants to go home."
"Never heard anything so selfish in my life." "We're always the first ones
to leave." "So are we." "Well, we're almost the last to-night," said one of
the men sheepishly. "The orchestra left half an hour ago." In spite of the
wives' agreement that such malevolence was beyond credibility, the dispute
ended in a short struggle, and both wives were lifted, kicking, into the
night. As I waited for my hat in the hall the door of the library opened and
Jordan Baker and Gatsby came out together. He was saying some last word to
her, but the eagerness in his manner tightened abruptly into formality as
several people approached him to say good-bye. Jordan's party were calling
impatiently to her from the porch, but she lingered for a moment to shake
hands. "I've just heard the most amazing thing," she whispered. "How long
were we in there?" "Why, about an hour." "It was--simply amazing," she
repeated abstractedly. "But I swore I wouldn't tell it and here I am
tantalizing you." She yawned gracefully in my face: "Please come and see me.
. . . Phone book . . . Under the name of Mrs. Sigourney Howard . . . My aunt
. . ." She was hurrying off as she talked--her brown hand waved a jaunty
salute as she melted into her party at the door. Rather ashamed that on my
first appearance I had stayed so late, I joined the last of Gatsby's guests,
who were clustered around him. I wanted to explain that I'd hunted for him
early in the evening and to apologize for not having known him in the
garden. "Don't mention it," he enjoined me eagerly. "Don't give it another
thought, old sport." The familiar expression held no more familiarity than
the hand which reassuringly brushed my shoulder. "And don't forget we're
going up in the hydroplane to-morrow morning, at nine o'clock." Then the
butler, behind his shoulder: "Philadelphia wants you on the 'phone, sir."
"All right, in a minute. Tell them I'll be right there. . . . good night."
"Good night." "Good night." He smiled--and suddenly there seemed to be a
pleasant significance in having been among the last to go, as if he had
desired it all the time. "Good night, old sport. . . . good night." But as I
walked down the steps I saw that the evening was not quite over. Fifty feet
from the door a dozen headlights illuminated a bizarre and tumultuous scene.
In the ditch beside the road, right side up, but violently shorn of one
wheel, rested a new coupe which had left Gatsby's drive not two minutes
before. The sharp jut of a wall accounted for the detachment of the wheel,
which was now getting considerable attention from half a dozen curious
chauffeurs. However, as they had left their cars blocking the road, a harsh,
discordant din from those in the rear had been audible for some time, and
added to the already violent confusion of the scene. A man in a long duster
had dismounted from the wreck and now stood in the middle of the road,
looking from the car to the tire and from the tire to the observers in a
pleasant, puzzled way. "See!" he explained. "It went in the ditch." The fact
was infinitely astonishing to him, and I recognized first the unusual
quality of wonder, and then the man--it was the late patron of Gatsby's
library. "How'd it happen?" He shrugged his shoulders. "I know nothing
whatever about mechanics," he said decisively. "But how did it happen? Did
you run into the wall?" "Don't ask me," said Owl Eyes, washing his hands of
the whole matter. "I know very little about driving--next to nothing. It
happened, and that's all I know." "Well, if you're a poor driver you
oughtn't to try driving at night." "But I wasn't even trying," he explained
indignantly, "I wasn't even trying." An awed hush fell upon the bystanders.
"Do you want to commit suicide?" "You're lucky it was just a wheel! A bad
driver and not even TRYing!" "You don't understand," explained the criminal.
"I wasn't driving. There's another man in the car." The shock that followed
this declaration found voice in a sustained "Ah-h-h!" as the door of the
coupe swung slowly open. The crowd--it was now a crowd--stepped back
involuntarily, and when the door had opened wide there was a ghostly pause.
Then, very gradually, part by part, a pale, dangling individual stepped out
of the wreck, pawing tentatively at the ground with a large uncertain
dancing shoe. Blinded by the glare of the headlights and confused by the
incessant groaning of the horns, the apparition stood swaying for a moment
before he perceived the man in the duster. "Wha's matter?" he inquired
calmly. "Did we run outa gas?" "Look!" Half a dozen fingers pointed at the
amputated wheel--he stared at it for a moment, and then looked upward as
though he suspected that it had dropped from the sky. "It came off," some
one explained. He nodded. "At first I din' notice we'd stopped." A pause.
Then, taking a long breath and straightening his shoulders, he remarked in a
determined voice: "Wonder'ff tell me where there's a gas'line station?" At
least a dozen men, some of them little better off than he was, explained to
him that wheel and car were no longer joined by any physical bond. "Back
out," he suggested after a moment. "Put her in reverse." "But the WHEEL'S
off!" He hesitated. "No harm in trying," he said. The caterwauling horns had
reached a crescendo and I turned away and cut across the lawn toward home. I
glanced back once. A wafer of a moon was shining over Gatsby's house, making
the night fine as before, and surviving the laughter and the sound of his
still glowing garden. A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows
and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the
host, who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.
Reading over what I have written so far, I see I have given the impression
that the events of three nights several weeks apart were all that absorbed
me. On the contrary, they were merely casual events in a crowded summer,
and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less than my personal
affairs. Most of the time I worked. In the early morning the sun threw my
shadow westward as I hurried down the white chasms of lower New York to the
Probity Trust. I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by their
first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded restaurants on little
pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee. I even had a short affair with
a girl who lived in Jersey City and worked in the accounting department, but
her brother began throwing mean looks in my direction, so when she went on
her vacation in July I let it blow quietly away. I took dinner usually at
the Yale Club--for some reason it was the gloomiest event of my day--and
then I went up-stairs to the library and studied investments and securities
for a conscientious hour. There were generally a few rioters around, but
they never came into the library, so it was a good place to work. After
that, if the night was mellow, I strolled down Madison Avenue past the old
Murray Hill Hotel, and over 33rd Street to the Pennsylvania Station. I began
to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the
satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives
to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic
women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter
into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my
mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets,
and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into
warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting
loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--poor young clerks who loitered
in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant
dinner--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night
and life. Again at eight o'clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were
five deep with throbbing taxi-cabs, bound for the theatre district, I felt a
sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and
voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted
cigarettes outlined unintelligible 70 gestures inside. Imagining that I,
too, was hurrying toward gayety and sharing their intimate excitement, I
wished them well. For a while I lost sight of Jordan Baker, and then in
midsummer I found her again. At first I was flattered to go places with her,
because she was a golf champion, and every one knew her name. Then it was
something more. I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender
curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed
something--most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they
don't in the beginning--and one day I found what it was. When we were on a
house-party together up in Warwick, she left a borrowed car out in the rain
with the top down, and then lied about it--and suddenly I remembered the
story about her that had eluded me that night at Daisy's. At her first big
golf tournament there was a row that nearly reached the newspapers--a
suggestion that she had moved her ball from a bad lie in the semi-final
round. The thing approached the proportions of a scandal--then died away. A
caddy retracted his statement, and the only other witness admitted that he
might have been mistaken. The incident and the name had remained together in
my mind. Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I
saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence
from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She
wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness,
I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in
order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy
the demands of her hard, jaunty body. It made no difference to me.
Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply--I was casually
sorry, and then I forgot. It was on that same house party that we had a
curious conversation about driving a car. It started because she passed so
close to some workmen that our fender flicked a button on one man's coat.
"You're a rotten driver," I protested. "Either you ought to be more careful,
or you oughtn't to drive at all." "I am careful." "No, you're not." "Well,
other people are," she said lightly. "What's that got to do with it?"
"They'll keep out of my way," she insisted. "It takes two to make an
accident." "Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself." "I hope
I never will," she answered. "I hate careless people. That's why I like
you." Her gray, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had
deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her.
But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my
desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that
tangle back home. I'd been writing letters once a week and signing them:
"Love, Nick," and all I could think of was how, when that certain girl
played tennis, a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on her upper lip.
Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that had to be tactfully broken
off before I was free. Every one suspects himself of at least one of the
cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I
have ever known. Chapter 4 On Sunday morning while church bells rang in the
villages alongshore, the world and its mistress 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 had found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and
second cousin to the devil. Reach me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop
into that there crystal glass." Once I wrote down on the empty spaces of a
time-table the names of those who came to Gatsby's house that summer. It is
an old time-table now, disintegrating at its folds, and headed "This
schedule in effect July 5th, 1922." But I can still read the gray names, and
they will give you a better impression than my generalities of those who
accepted Gatsby's hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing
nothing whatever about him. From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers
and the Leeches, and a man named Bunsen, whom I knew at Yale, and Doctor
Webster Civet, who was drowned last summer up in Maine. And the Hornbeams
and the Willie Voltaires, and a whole clan named Blackbuck, who always
gathered in a corner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosoever came
near. And the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr.
Chrystie's wife), and Edgar Beaver, whose hair, they say, turned
cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all. Clarence Endive
was from East Egg, as I remember. He came only once, in white
knickerbockers, and had a fight with a bum named Etty in the garden. From
farther out on the Island came the Cheadles and the O. R. P. Schraeders, and
the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of Georgia, and the Fishguards and the Ripley
Snells. Snell was there three days before he went to the penitentiary, so
drunk out on the gravel drive that Mrs. Ulysses Swett's automobile ran over
his right hand. The Dancies came, too, and S. B. Whitebait, who was well
over sixty, and Maurice A. Flink, and the Hammerheads, and Beluga the
tobacco importer, and Beluga's girls. From West Egg came the Poles and the
Mulreadys and Cecil Roebuck and Cecil Schoen and Gulick the state senator
and Newton Orchid, who controlled Films Par Excellence, and Eckhaust and
Clyde Cohen and Don S. Schwartze (the son) and Arthur McCarty, all connected
with the movies in one way or another. And the Catlips and the Bembergs and
G. Earl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon who afterward strangled his wife.
Da Fontano the promoter came there, and Ed Legros and James B. ("Rot-Gut.")
Ferret and the De Jongs and Ernest Lilly--they came to gamble, and when
Ferret wandered into the garden it meant he was cleaned out and Associated
Traction would have to fluctuate profitably next day. A man named
Klipspringer was there so often and so long that he became known as "the
boarder."--I doubt if he had any other home. Of theatrical people there were
Gus Waize and Horace O'donavan and Lester Meyer and George Duckweed and
Francis Bull. Also from New York were the Chromes and the Backhyssons and
the Dennickers and Russel Betty and the Corrigans and the Kellehers and the
Dewars and the Scullys and S. W. Belcher and the Smirkes and the young
Quinns, divorced now, and Henry L. Palmetto, who killed himself by jumping
in front of a subway train in Times Square. Benny McClenahan arrived always
with four girls. They were never quite the same ones in physical person, but
they were so identical one with another that it inevitably seemed they had
been there before. I have forgotten their names--Jaqueline, I think, or else
Consuela, or Gloria or Judy or June, and their last names were either the
melodious names of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the 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 Baedeker girls and young Brewer,
who had his nose shot off in the war, and Mr. Albrucksburger and Miss Haag,
his fiancee, and Ardita Fitz-Peters 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 have forgotten. All these people came to Gatsby's house
in the summer. At nine o'clock, one morning late in 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 in his hydroplane, and, at his
urgent invitation, made frequent use of his beach. "Good morning, old sport.
You're having lunch with me to-day 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, old 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 wind-shields that mirrored a
dozen suns. 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 road-house 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 a 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 that sudden extinction of a clan still haunted him. For a moment I
suspected that he was pulling my leg, but a glance at him convinced me
otherwise. "After that I lived like a young rajah 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 had 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 of a turbaned "character."
leaking sawdust at every pore as he pursued a tiger through the Bois de
Boulogne. "Then came the war, old 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 mile gap on
either side of us where the infantry couldn't advance. We stayed there two
days and two nights, a hundred and thirty men with sixteen 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 promoted to be a major, and every
Allied government gave me a decoration--even Montenegro, little Montenegro
down on the Adriatic Sea!" Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and
nodded at them--with his 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. "Orderi di Danilo," ran the
circular legend, "Montenegro, Nicolas Rex." "Turn it." "Major Jay Gatsby," I
read, "For Valour 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 the Earl of Dorcaster." 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 Gatsby, 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 gnawings of his broken heart. "I'm going
to make a big request of you to-day," 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
thing that happened to me." He hesitated. "You'll hear about it this
afternoon." "At lunch?" "No, this afternoon. I happened 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 what "this
matter." was, but I was more annoyed than interested. I hadn't asked Jordan
to tea in order to discuss Mr. 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-gilt nineteen-hundreds.
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 panting vitality as we went
by. With fenders spread like wings we scattered light through half Long
Island City--only half, for as we twisted among the pillars of the elevated
I heard the familiar "jug--jug--SPAT!" of a motorcycle, and a frantic
policeman rode alongside. "All right, old 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 across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a
wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro 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 short upper lips of southeastern Europe, and I was glad that the
sight of Gatsby's splendid car was included in their sombre holiday. As we
crossed Blackwell's Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white
chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl. I
laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward 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 Forty-second Street
cellar I met Gatsby for lunch. Blinking away the brightness of the street
outside, my eyes picked him out obscurely in the anteroom, talking to
another man. "Mr. Carraway, this is my friend Mr. Wolfshiem." 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 Mr.
Wolfshiem, 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
Katspaugh and I sid: 'all right, Katspaugh, don't pay him a penny till he
shuts his mouth.' He shut it then and there." Gatsby took an arm of each of
us and moved forward into the restaurant, whereupon Mr. Wolfshiem swallowed
a new sentence he was starting and lapsed into a somnambulatory abstraction.
"Highballs?" asked the head waiter. "This is a nice restaurant here," said
Mr. Wolfshiem, looking at the Presbyterian nymphs on the ceiling. "But I
like across the street better!" "Yes, highballs," agreed Gatsby, and then to
Mr. Wolfshiem: "It's too hot over there." "Hot and small--yes," said Mr.
Wolfshiem, "but full of memories." "What place is that?" I asked. "The old
Metropole. "The old Metropole," brooded Mr. Wolfshiem 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 Rosy Rosenthal there. It was six of us at
the table, and Rosy had eat and 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 Rosy, and begins to get up, and I
pulled him down in his chair. "'Let the bastards come in here if they want
you, Rosy, but don't you, so help me, move outside this room.' "It was four
o'clock in the morning then, and if we'd of raised the blinds we'd of seen
daylight." "Did he go?" I asked innocently. "Sure he went." Mr. Wolfshiem's
nose flashed at me indignantly. "He turned around in the door and says:
'Don't let that waiter take away my coffee!' 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 Becker."
His nostrils turned to me in an interested way. "I understand you're looking
for a business gonnegtion." The juxtaposition of these two remarks was
startling. Gatsby answered for me: "Oh, no," he exclaimed, "this isn't the
man." "No?" Mr. Wolfshiem seemed disappointed. "This is just a friend. I
told you we'd talk about that some other time." "I beg your pardon," said
Mr. Wolfshiem, "I had a wrong man." A succulent hash arrived, and Mr.
Wolfshiem, 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 arc by turning to inspect the people
directly behind. I think that, except for my presence, he would have taken
one short glance beneath our own table. "Look here, old sport," said Gatsby,
leaning toward me, "I'm afraid I made you a little angry this morning in the
car." There was the 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 has it all got to come
through Miss Baker?" "Oh, it's nothing underhand," he assured me. "Miss
Baker's a great sportswoman, 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. Wolfshiem at the table. "He has to
telephone," said Mr. Wolfshiem, following him with his eyes. "Fine fellow,
isn't he? Handsome to look at and a perfect gentleman." "Yes." "He's an
Oggsford man." "Oh!" "He went to Oggsford College in England. You know
Oggsford College?" "I've heard of it." "It's one of the most famous colleges
in the world." "Have you known Gatsby 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 had discovered a man of fine
breeding after I talked with him an hour. I said to myself: 'There's the
kind of man you'd like to take home and introduce to your mother and
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 molars," he informed me. "Well!"
I inspected them. "That's a very interesting idea." "Yeah." He flipped his
sleeves up under his coat. "Yeah, Gatsby's very careful about women. He
would never so much as look at a friend's wife." When the subject of this
instinctive trust returned to the table and sat down Mr. Wolfshiem 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, Meyer," said Gatsby, without enthusiasm. Mr.
Wolfshiem 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 me, I am fifty years
old, and I won't 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 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?" "Meyer Wolfshiem? No, he's a gambler." Gatsby hesitated, then
added coolly: "He's the man who fixed the World's Series back in 1919."
"Fixed the World's Series?" I repeated. The idea staggered me. I remembered,
of course, that the World's 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 fifty million people--with the
single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe. "How did he happen to do
that?" I asked after a minute. "He just saw 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 some one." When he saw us Tom jumped up and took
half a dozen steps in our direction. "Where've you been?" he demamded
eagerly. "Daisy's furious because you haven't called up." "This is Mr.
Gatsby, Mr. Buchanan." They shook hands briefly, and a strained, unfamiliar
look of embarrassment came over Gatsby's face. "How've 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. Gatsby." I turned toward Mr. Gatsby, but he was
no longer there. One October day in nineteen-seventeen---- (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 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
disapproving 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 monopolizing her that night. "Anyways, for an
hour!" When I came opposite her house that morning her white roadster was
beside the curb, and she was sitting in it with a lieutenant I had never
seen before. They were so engrossed 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 rumors 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 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 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 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 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 twilight: "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 aspired on that June
night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his
purposeless splendor. "He wants to know," continued 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 dispensed 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 expected her to wander into one of his
parties, some night," went 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 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 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 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 jauntily 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 facade 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, tightening my arms. Her wan,
scornful mouth smiled, and so I drew her up again closer, this time to my
face. Chapter 5 When I came home to West Egg that night I was afraid for a
moment that my house was on fire. Two o'clock and the whole corner of the
peninsula was blazing with light, which fell unreal on the shrubbery and
made thin elongating glints upon the roadside wires. Turning a corner, I saw
that it was Gatsby's house, lit from tower to cellar. At first I thought it
was another party, a wild rout that had resolved itself into
"hide-and-go-seek." or "sardines-in-the-box." with all the house thrown open
to the game. But there wasn't a sound. Only wind in the trees, which blew
the wires and made the lights go off and on again as if the house had winked
into the darkness. As my taxi groaned away I saw Gatsby walking toward me
across his lawn. "Your place looks like the World's Fair," I said. "Does
it?" He turned his eyes toward it absently. "I have been glancing into some
of the rooms. Let's go to Coney Island, old sport. In my car." "It's too
late." "Well, suppose we take a plunge in the swimming-pool? I haven't made
use of it all summer." "I've got to go to bed." "All right." He waited,
looking at me with suppressed eagerness. "I talked with Miss Baker," I said
after a moment. "I'm going to call up Daisy to-morrow and invite her over
here to tea." "Oh, that's all right," he said carelessly. "I don't want to
put you to any trouble." "What day would suit you?" "What day would suit
YOU?" he corrected me quickly. "I don't want to put you to any trouble, you
see." "How about the day after to-morrow?" He considered for a moment. Then,
with reluctance: "I want to get the grass cut," he said. We both looked at
the grass--there was a sharp line where my ragged lawn ended and the darker,
well-kept expanse of his began. I suspected that he meant my grass. "There's
another little thing," he said uncertainly, and hesitated. "Would you rather
put it off for a few days?" I asked. "Oh, it isn't about that. At least----"
He fumbled with a series of beginnings. "Why, I thought--why, look here, old
sport, you don't make much money, do you?" "Not very much." This seemed to
reassure him and he continued more confidently. "I thought you didn't, if
you'll pardon my--You see, I carry on a little business on the side, a sort
of side line, you understand. And I thought that if you don't make very
much--You're selling bonds, aren't you, old sport?" "Trying to." "Well, this
would interest you. It wouldn't take up much of your time and you might pick
up a nice bit of money. It happens to be a rather confidential sort of
thing." I realize now that under different circumstances that conversation
might have been one of the crises of my life. But, because the offer was
obviously and tactlessly for a service to be rendered, I had no choice
except to cut him off there. "I've got my hands full," I said. "I'm much
obliged but I couldn't take on any more work." "You wouldn't have to do any
business with Wolfshiem." Evidently he thought that I was shying away from
the "gonnegtion." mentioned at lunch, but I assured him he was wrong. He
waited a moment longer, hoping I'd begin a conversation, but I was too
absorbed to be responsive, so he went unwillingly home. The evening had made
me light-headed and happy; I think I walked into a deep sleep as I entered
my front door. So I didn't know whether or not Gatsby went to Coney Island,
or for how many hours he "glanced into rooms." while his house blazed
gaudily on. I called up Daisy from the office next morning, and invited her
to come to tea. "Don't bring Tom," I warned her. "What?" "Don't bring Tom."
"Who is 'Tom'?" she asked innocently. The day agreed upon was pouring rain.
At eleven o'clock a man in a raincoat, dragging a lawn-mower, tapped at my
front door and said that Mr. Gatsby had sent him over to cut my grass. This
reminded me that I had forgotten to tell my Finn to come back, so I drove
into West Egg Village to search for her among soggy, whitewashed alleys and
to buy some cups and lemons and flowers. The flowers were unnecessary, for
at two o'clock a greenhouse arrived from Gatsby's, with innumerable
receptacles to contain it. An hour later the front door opened nervously,
and Gatsby, in a white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-colored tie,
hurried in. He was pale, and there were dark signs of sleeplessness beneath
his eyes. "Is everything all right?" he asked immediately. "The grass looks
fine, if that's what you mean." "What grass?" he inquired blankly. "Oh, the
grass in the yard." He looked out the window at it, but, judging from his
expression, I don't believe he saw a thing. "Looks very good," he remarked
vaguely. "One of the papers said they thought the rain would stop about
four. I think it was the JOURNAL. Have you got everything you need in the
shape of--of tea?" I took him into the pantry, where he looked a little
reproachfully at the Finn. Together we scrutinized the twelve lemon cakes
from the delicatessen shop. "Will they do?" I asked. "Of course, of course!
They're fine!" and he added hollowly, ". . .old sport." The rain cooled
about half-past three to a damp mist, through which occasional thin drops
swam like dew. Gatsby looked with vacant eyes through a copy of Clay's
ECONOMICS, starting at the Finnish tread that shook the kitchen floor, and
peering toward the bleared windows from time to time as if a series of
invisible but alarming happenings were taking place outside. Finally he got
up and informed me, in an uncertain voice, that he was going home. "Why's
that?" "Nobody's coming to tea. It's too late!" He looked at his watch as if
there was some pressing demand on his time elsewhere. "I can't wait all
day." "Don't be silly; it's just two minutes to four." He sat down
miserably, as if I had pushed him, and simultaneously there was the sound of
a motor turning into my lane. We both jumped up, and, a little harrowed
myself, I went out into the yard. Under the dripping bare lilac-trees a
large open car was coming up the drive. It stopped. Daisy's face, tipped
sideways beneath a three-cornered lavender hat, looked out at me with a
bright ecstatic smile. "Is this absolutely where you live, my dearest one?"
The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I had to
follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone, before
any words came through. A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of blue paint
across her cheek, and her hand was wet with glistening drops as I took it to
help her from the car. "Are you in love with me," she said low in my ear,
"or why did I have to come alone?" "That's the secret of Castle Rackrent.
Tell your chauffeur to go far away and spend an hour." "Come back in an
hour, Ferdie." Then in a grave murmur: "His name is Ferdie." "Does the
gasoline affect his nose?" "I don't think so," she said innocently. "Why?"
We went in. To my overwhelming surprise the living-room was deserted. "Well,
that's funny," I exclaimed. "What's funny?" She turned her head as there was
a light dignified knocking at the front door. I went out and opened it.
Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat
pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes.
With his hands still in his coat pockets he stalked by me into the hall,
turned sharply as if he were on a wire, and disappeared into the
living-room. It wasn't a bit funny. Aware of the loud beating of my own
heart I pulled the door to against the increasing rain. For half a minute
there wasn't a sound. Then from the living-room I heard a sort of choking
murmur and part of a laugh, followed by Daisy's voice on a clear artificial
note: "I certainly am awfully glad to see you again." A pause; it endured
horribly. I had nothing to do in the hall, so I went into the room. Gatsby,
his hands still in his pockets, was reclining against the mantelpiece in a
strained counterfeit of perfect ease, even of boredom. His head leaned back
so far that it rested against the face of a defunct mantelpiece clock, and
from this position his distraught eyes stared down at Daisy, who was
sitting, frightened but graceful, on the edge of a stiff chair. "We've met
before," muttered Gatsby. His eyes glanced momentarily at me, and his lips
parted with an abortive attempt at a laugh. Luckily the clock took this
moment to tilt dangerously at the pressure of his head, whereupon he turned
and caught it with trembling fingers, and set it back in place. Then he sat
down, rigidly, his elbow on the arm of the sofa and his chin in his hand.
"I'm sorry about the clock," he said. My own face had now assumed a deep
tropical burn. I couldn't muster up a single commonplace out of the thousand
in my head. "It's an old clock," I told them idiotically. I think we all
believed for a moment that it had smashed in pieces on the floor. "We
haven't met for many years," said Daisy, her voice as matter-of-fact as it
could ever be. "Five years next November." The automatic quality of Gatsby's
answer set us all back at least another minute. I had them both on their
feet with the desperate suggestion that they help me make tea in the kitchen
when the demoniac Finn brought it in on a tray. Amid the welcome confusion
of cups and cakes a certain physical decency established itself. Gatsby got
himself into a shadow and, while Daisy and I talked, looked conscientiously
from one to the other of us with tense, unhappy eyes. However, as calmness
wasn't an end in itself, I made an excuse at the first possible moment, and
got to my feet. "Where are you going?" demanded Gatsby in immediate alarm.
"I'll be back." "I've got to speak to you about something before you go." He
followed me wildly into the kitchen, closed the door, and whispered: "Oh,
God!" in a miserable way. "What's the matter?" "This is a terrible mistake,"
he said, shaking his head from side to side, "a terrible, terrible mistake."
"You're just embarrassed, that's all," and luckily I added: "Daisy's
embarrassed too." "She's embarrassed?" he repeated incredulously. "Just as
much as you are." "Don't talk so loud." "You're acting like a little boy," I
broke out impatiently. "Not only that, but you're rude. Daisy's sitting in
there all alone." He raised his hand to stop my words, looked at me with
unforgettable reproach, and, opening the door cautiously, went back into the
other room. I walked out the back way--just as Gatsby had when he had made
his nervous circuit of the house half an hour before--and ran for a huge
black knotted tree, whose massed leaves made a fabric against the rain. Once
more it was pouring, and my irregular lawn, well-shaved by Gatsby's
gardener, abounded in small, muddy swamps and prehistoric marshes. There was
nothing to look at from under the tree except Gatsby's enormous house, so I
stared at it, like Kant at his church steeple, for half an hour. A brewer
had built it early in the "period." craze, a decade before, and there was a
story that he'd agreed to pay five years' taxes on all the neighboring
cottages if the owners would have their roofs thatched with straw. Perhaps
their refusal took the heart out of his plan to Found a Family--he went into
an immediate decline. His children sold his house with the black wreath
still on the door. Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have
always been obstinate about being peasantry. After half an hour, the sun
shone again, and the grocer's automobile rounded Gatsby's drive with the raw
material for his servants' dinner--I felt sure he wouldn't eat a spoonful. A
maid began opening the upper windows of his house, appeared momentarily in
each, and, leaning from a large central bay, spat meditatively into the
garden. It was time I went back. While the rain continued it had seemed like
the murmur of their voices, rising and swelling a little now and then with
gusts of emotion. But in the new silence I felt that silence had fallen
within the house too. I went in--after making every possible noise in the
kitchen, short of pushing over the stove--but I don't believe they heard a
sound. They were sitting at either end of the couch, looking at each other
as if some question had been asked, or was in the air, and every vestige of
embarrassment was gone. Daisy's face was smeared with tears, and when I came
in she jumped up and began wiping at it with her handkerchief before a
mirror. But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He
literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being
radiated from him and filled the little room. "Oh, hello, old sport," he
said, as if he hadn't seen me for years. I thought for a moment he was going
to shake hands. "It's stopped raining." "Has it?" When he realized what I
was talking about, that there were twinkle-bells of sunshine in the room, he
smiled like a weather man, like an ecstatic patron of recurrent light, and
repeated the news to Daisy. "What do you think of that? It's stopped
raining." "I'm glad, Jay." Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told
only of her unexpected joy. "I want you and Daisy to come over to my house,"
he said, "I'd like to show her around." "You're sure you want me to come?"
"Absolutely, old sport." Daisy went up-stairs to wash her face--too late I
thought with humiliation of my towels--while Gatsby and I waited on the
lawn. "My house looks well, doesn't it?" he demanded. "See how the whole
front of it catches the light." I agreed that it was splendid. "Yes." His
eyes went over it, every arched door and square tower. "It took me just
three years to earn the money that bought it." "I thought you inherited your
money." "I did, old sport," he said automatically, "but I lost most of it in
the big panic--the panic of the war." I think he hardly knew what he was
saying, for when I asked him what business he was in he answered, "That's my
affair," before he realized that it wasn't the appropriate reply. "Oh, I've
been in several things," he corrected himself. "I was in the drug business
and then I was in the oil business. But I'm not in either one now." He
looked at me with more attention. "Do you mean you've been thinking over
what I proposed the other night?" Before I could answer, Daisy came out of
the house and two rows of brass buttons on her dress gleamed in the
sunlight. "That huge place THERE?" she cried pointing. "Do you like it?" "I
love it, but I don't see how you live there all alone." "I keep it always
full of interesting people, night and day. People who do interesting things.
Celebrated people." Instead of taking the short cut along the Sound we went
down the road and entered by the big postern. With enchanting murmurs Daisy
admired this aspect or that of the feudal silhouette against the sky,
admired the gardens, the sparkling odor of jonquils and the frothy odor of
hawthorn and plum blossoms and the pale gold odor of kiss-me-at-the-gate. It
was strange to reach the marble steps and find no stir of bright dresses in
and out the door, and hear no sound but bird voices in the trees. And
inside, as we wandered through Marie Antoinette music-rooms and Restoration
salons, I felt that there were guests concealed behind every couch and
table, under orders to be breathlessly silent until we had passed through.
As Gatsby closed the door of "the Merton College Library." I could have
sworn I heard the owl-eyed man break into ghostly laughter. We went
up-stairs, through period bedrooms swathed in rose and lavender silk and
vivid with new flowers, through dressing-rooms and poolrooms, and bathrooms
with sunken baths--intruding into one chamber where a dishevelled man in
pajamas was doing liver exercises on the floor. It was Mr. Klipspringer, the
"boarder." I had seen him wandering hungrily about the beach that morning.
Finally we came to Gatsby's own apartment, a bedroom and a bath, and an Adam
study, where we sat down and drank a glass of some Chartreuse he took from a
cupboard in the wall. He hadn't once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he
revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it
drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his
possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence
none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly toppled down a flight of
stairs. His bedroom was the simplest room of all--except where the dresser
was garnished with a toilet set of pure dull gold. Daisy took the brush with
delight, and smoothed her hair, whereupon Gatsby sat down and shaded his
eyes and began to laugh. "It's the funniest thing, old sport," he said
hilariously. "I can't--When I try to----" He had passed visibly through two
states and was entering upon a third. After his embarrassment and his
unreasoning joy he was consumed with wonder at her presence. He had been
full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with
his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in
the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock. Recovering
himself in a minute he opened for us two hulking patent cabinets which held
his massed suits and dressing-gowns and ties, and his shirts, piled like
bricks in stacks a dozen high. "I've got a man in England who buys me
clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each
season, spring and fall." He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing
them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine
flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in
many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich
heap mounted higher--shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and
apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue.
Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and
began to cry stormily. "They're such beautiful shirts," she sobbed, her
voice muffled in the thick folds. "It makes me sad because I've never seen
such--such beautiful shirts before." After the house, we were to see the
grounds and the swimming-pool, and the hydroplane and the mid-summer
flowers--but outside Gatsby's window it began to rain again, so we stood in
a row looking at the corrugated surface of the Sound. "If it wasn't for the
mist we could see your home across the bay," said Gatsby. "You always have a
green light that burns all night at the end of your dock." Daisy put her arm
through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said.
Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light
had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated
him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had
seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a
dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one. I began to walk
about the room, examining various indefinite objects in the half darkness. A
large photograph of an elderly man in yachting costume attracted me, hung on
the wall over his desk. "Who's this?" "That? That's Mr. Dan Cody, old
sport." The name sounded faintly familiar. "He's dead now. He used to be my
best friend years ago." There was a small picture of Gatsby, also in
yachting costume, on the bureau--Gatsby with his head thrown back
defiantly--taken apparently when he was about eighteen. "I adore it,"
exclaimed Daisy. "The pompadour! You never told me you had a pompadour--or a
yacht." "Look at this," said Gatsby quickly. "Here's a lot of
clippings--about you." They stood side by side examining it. I was going to
ask to see the rubies when the phone rang, and Gatsby took up the receiver.
"Yes. . . . well, I can't talk now. . . . I can't talk now, old sport. . . .
I said a SMALL town. . . . he must know what a small town is. . . . well,
he's no use to us if Detroit is his idea of a small town. . . ." He rang
off. "Come here QUICK!" cried Daisy at the window. The rain was still
falling, but the darkness had parted in the west, and there was a pink and
golden billow of foamy clouds above the sea. "Look at that," she whispered,
and then after a moment: "I'd like to just get one of those pink clouds and
put you in it and push you around." I tried to go then, but they wouldn't
hear of it; perhaps my presence made them feel more satisfactorily alone. "I
know what we'll do," said Gatsby, "we'll have Klipspringer play the piano."
He went out of the room calling "Ewing!" and returned in a few minutes
accompanied by an embarrassed, slightly worn young man, with shell-rimmed
glasses and scanty blond hair. He was now decently clothed in a "sport
shirt," open at the neck, sneakers, and duck trousers of a nebulous hue.
"Did we interrupt your exercises?" inquired Daisy politely. "I was asleep,"
cried Mr. Klipspringer, in a spasm of embarrassment. "That is, I'd BEEN
asleep. Then I got up. . . ." "Klipspringer plays the piano," said Gatsby,
cutting him off. "Don't you, Ewing, old sport?" "I don't play well. I
don't--I hardly play at all. I'm all out of prac----" "We'll go
down-stairs," interrupted Gatsby. He flipped a switch. The gray windows
disappeared as the house glowed full of light. In the music-room Gatsby
turned on a solitary lamp beside the piano. He lit Daisy's cigarette from a
trembling match, and sat down with her on a couch far across the room, where
there was no light save what the gleaming floor bounced in from the hall.
When Klipspringer had played THE LOVE NEST. he turned around on the bench
and searched unhappily for Gatsby in the gloom. "I'm all out of practice,
you see. I told you I couldn't play. I'm all out of prac----" "Don't talk so
much, old sport," commanded Gatsby. "Play!" "IN THE MORNING, IN THE EVENING,
AIN'T WE GOT FUN----" Outside the wind was loud and there was a faint flow
of thunder along the Sound. All the lights were going on in West Egg now;
the electric trains, men-carrying, were plunging home through the rain from
New York. It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was
generating on the air. "ONE THING'S SURE AND NOTHING'S SURER THE RICH GET
RICHER AND THE POOR GET--CHILDREN. IN THE MEANTIME, IN BETWEEN TIME----" As
I went over to say good-by I saw that the expression of bewilderment had
come back into Gatsby's face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as
to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have
been moments even that afternoon whe Daisy tumbled short of his dreams--not
through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.
It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it
with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with
every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness
can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart. As I watched
him he adjusted himself a little, visibly. His hand took hold of hers, and
as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of
emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish
warmth, because it couldn't be over-dreamed--that voice was a deathless
song. They had forgotten me, but Daisy glanced up and held out her hand;
Gatsby didn't know me now at all. I looked once more at them and they looked
back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life. Then I went out of the room
and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them there together.
Chapter 6 About this time an ambitious young reporter from New York arrived
one morning at Gatsby's door and asked him if he had anything to say.
"Anything to say about what?" inquired Gatsby politely. "Why--any statement
to give out." It transpired after a confused five minutes that the man had
heard Gatsby's name around his office in a connection which he either
wouldn't reveal or didn't fully understand. This was his day off and with
laudable initiative he had hurried out "to see." It was a random shot, and
yet the reporter's instinct was right. Gatsby's notoriety, spread about by
the hundreds who had accepted his hospitality and so become authorities on
his past, had increased all summer until he fell just short of being news.
Contemporary legends such as the "underground pipe-line to Canada." attached
themselves to him, and there was one persistent story that he didn't live in
a house at all, but in a boat that looked like a house and was moved
secretly up and down the Long Island shore. Just why these inventions were a
source of satisfaction to James Gatz of North Dakota, isn't easy to say.
James Gatz--that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed
it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the
beginning of his career--when he saw Dan Cody's yacht drop anchor over the
most insidious flat on Lake Superior. It was James Gatz who had been loafing
along the beach that afternoon in a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas
pants, but it was already Jay Gatsby who borrowed a rowboat, pulled out to
the TUOLOMEE, and informed Cody that a wind might catch him and break him up
in half an hour. I suppose he'd had the name ready for a long time, even
then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people--his
imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth
was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic
conception of himself. He was a son of God--a phrase which, if it means
anything, means just that--and he must be about His Father's business, the
service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the
sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent,
and to this conception he was faithful to the end. For over a year he had
been beating his way along the south shore of Lake Superior as a clam-digger
and a salmon-fisher or in any other capacity that brought him food and bed.
His brown, hardening body lived naturally through the half-fierce, half-lazy
work of the bracing days. He knew women early, and since they spoiled him he
became contemptuous of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of
the others because they were hysterical about things which in his
overwhelming self-absorbtion he took for granted. But his heart was in a
constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted
him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out
in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked
with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to
the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid
scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an
outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality
of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a
fairy's wing. An instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months
before, to the small Lutheran college of St. Olaf in southern Minnesota. He
stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums
of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor's work with
which he was to pay his way through. Then he drifted back to Lake Superior,
and he was still searching for something to do on the day that Dan Cody's
yacht dropped anchor in the shallows alongshore. Cody was fifty years old
then, a product of the Nevada silver fields, of the Yukon, of every rush for
metal since seventy-five. The transactions in Montana copper that made him
many times a millionaire found him physically robust but on the verge of
soft-mindedness, and, suspecting this, an infinite number of women tried to
separate him from his money. The none too savory ramifications by which Ella
Kaye, the newspaper woman, played Madame de Maintenon to his weakness and
sent him to sea in a yacht, were common knowledge to the turgid
sub-journalism of 1902. He had been coasting along all too hospitable shores
for five years when he turned up as James Gatz's destiny at Little Girls
Point. To the young Gatz, resting on his oars and looking up at the railed
deck, the yacht represented all the beauty and glamour in the world. I
suppose he smiled at Cody--he had probably discovered that people liked him
when he smiled. At any rate Cody asked him a few questions (one of them
elicited the brand new name) and found that he was quick and extravagantly
ambitious. A few days later he took him to Duluth and bought him a blue
coat, six pair of white duck trousers, and a yachting cap. And when the
TUOLOMEE left for the West Indies and the Barbary Coast Gatsby left too. He
was employed in a vague personal capacity--while he remained with Cody he
was in turn steward, mate, skipper, secretary, and even jailor, for Dan Cody
sober knew what lavish doings Dan Cody drunk might soon be about, and he
provided for such contingencies by reposing more and more trust in Gatsby.
The arrangement lasted five years, during which the boat went three times
around the Continent. It might have lasted indefinitely except for the fact
that Ella Kaye came on board one night in Boston and a week later Dan Cody
inhospitably died. I remember the portrait of him up in Gatsby's bedroom, a
gray, florid man with a hard, empty face--the pioneer debauchee, who during
one phase of American life brought back to the Eastern seaboard the savage
violence of the frontier brothel and saloon. It was indirectly due to Cody
that Gatsby drank so little. Sometimes in the course of gay parties women
used to rub champagne into his hair; for himself he formed the habit of
letting liquor alone. And it was from Cody that he inherited money--a legacy
of twenty-five thousand dollars. He didn't get it. He never understood the
legal device that was used against him, but what remained of the millions
went intact to Ella Kaye. He was left with his singularly appropriate
education; the vague contour of Jay Gatsby had filled out to the
substantiality of a man. He told me all this very much later, but I've put
it down here with the idea of exploding those first wild rumors about his
antecedents, which weren't even faintly true. Moreover he told it to me at a
time of confusion, when I had reached the point of believing everything and
nothing about him. So I take advantage of this short halt, while Gatsby, so
to speak, caught his breath, to clear this set of misconceptions away. It
was a halt, too, in my association with his affairs. For several weeks I
didn't see him or hear his voice on the phone--mostly I was in New York,
trotting around with Jordan and trying to ingratiate myself with her senile
aunt--but finally I went over to his house one Sunday afternoon. I hadn't
been there two minutes when somebody brought Tom Buchanan in for a drink. I
was startled, naturally, but the really surprising thing was that it hadn't
happened before. They were a party of three on horseback--Tom and a man
named Sloane and a pretty woman in a brown riding-habit, who had been there
previously. "I'm delighted to see you," said Gatsby, standing on his porch.
"I'm delighted that you dropped in." As though they cared! "Sit right down.
Have a cigarette or a cigar." He walked around the room quickly, ringing
bells. "I'll have something to drink for you in just a minute." He was
profoundly affected by the fact that Tom was there. But he would be uneasy
anyhow until he had given them something, realizing in a vague way that that
was all they came for. Mr. Sloane wanted nothing. A lemonade? No, thanks. A
little champagne? Nothing at all, thanks. . . . I'm sorry---- "Did you have
a nice ride?" "Very good roads around here." "I suppose the automobiles----"
"Yeah." Moved by an irresistible impulse, Gatsby turned to Tom, who had
accepted the introduction as a stranger. "I believe we've met somewhere
before, Mr. Buchanan." "Oh, yes," said Tom, gruffly polite, but obviously
not remembering. "So we did. I remember very well." "About two weeks ago."
"That's right. You were with Nick here." "I know your wife," continued
Gatsby, almost aggressively. "That so?" Tom turned to me. "You live near
here, Nick?" "Next door." "That so?" Mr. Sloane didn't enter into the
conversation, but lounged back haughtily in his chair; the woman said
nothing either--until unexpectedly, after two highballs, she became cordial.
"We'll all come over to your next party, Mr. Gatsby," she suggested. "What
do you say?" "Certainly; I'd be delighted to have you." "Be ver' nice," said
Mr. Sloane, without gratitude. "Well--think ought to be starting home."
"Please don't hurry," Gatsby urged them. He had control of himself now, and
he wanted to see more of Tom. "Why don't you--why don't you stay for supper?
I wouldn't be surprised if some other people dropped in from New York." "You
come to supper with ME," said the lady enthusiastically. "Both of you." This
included me. Mr. Sloane got to his feet. "Come along," he said--but to her
only. "I mean it," she insisted. "I'd love to have you. Lots of room."
Gatsby looked at me questioningly. He wanted to go, and he didn't see that
Mr. Sloane had determined he shouldn't. "I'm afraid I won't be able to," I
said. "Well, you come," she urged, concentrating on Gatsby. Mr. Sloane
murmured something close to her ear. "We won't be late if we start now," she
insisted aloud. "I haven't got a horse," said Gatsby. "I used to ride in the
army, but I've never bought a horse. I'll have to follow you in my car.
Excuse me for just a minute." The rest of us walked out on the porch, where
Sloane and the lady began an impassioned conversation aside. "My God, I
believe the man's coming," said Tom. "Doesn't he know she doesn't want him?"
"She says she does want him." "She has a big dinner party and he won't know
a soul there." He frowned. "I wonder where in the devil he met Daisy. By
God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these
days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish." Suddenly Mr. Sloane and
the lady walked down the steps and mounted their horses. "Come on," said Mr.
Sloane to Tom, "we're late. We've got to go." And then to me: "Tell him we
couldn't wait, will you?" Tom and I shook hands, the rest of us exchanged a
cool nod, and they trotted quickly down the drive, disappearing under the
August foliage just as Gatsby, with hat and light overcoat in hand, came out
the front door. Tom was evidently perturbed at Daisy's running around alone,
for on the following Saturday night he came with her to Gatsby's party.
Perhaps his presence gave the evening its peculiar quality of
oppressiveness--it stands out in my memory from Gatsby's other parties that
summer. There were the same people, or at least the same sort of people, the
same profusion of champagne, the same many-colored, many-keyed commotion,
but I felt an unpleasantness in the air, a pervading harshness that hadn't
been there before. Or perhaps I had merely grown used to it, grown to accept
West Egg as a world complete in itself, with its own standards and its own
great figures, second to nothing because it had no consciousness of being
so, and now I was looking at it again, through Daisy's eyes. It is
invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have
expended your own powers of adjustment. They arrived at twilight, and, as we
strolled out among the sparkling hundreds, Daisy's voice was playing
murmurous tricks in her throat. "These things excite me so," she whispered.
"If you want to kiss me any time during the evening, Nick, just let me know
and I'll be glad to arrange it for you. Just mention my name. Or present a
green card. I'm giving out green----" "Look around," suggested Gatsby. "I'm
looking around. I'm having a marvelous----" "You must see the faces of many
people you've heard about." Tom's arrogant eyes roamed the crowd. "We don't
go around very much," he said. "In fact, I was just thinking I don't know a
soul here." "Perhaps you know that lady." Gatsby indicated a gorgeous,
scarcely human orchid of a woman who sat in state under a white plum tree.
Tom and Daisy stared, with that peculiarly unreal feeling that accompanies
the recognition of a hitherto ghostly celebrity of the movies. "She's
lovely," said Daisy. "The man bending over her is her director." He took
them ceremoniously from group to group: "Mrs. Buchanan . . . and Mr.
Buchanan----" After an instant's hesitation he added: "the polo player." "Oh
no," objected Tom quickly, "not me." But evidently the sound of it pleased
Gatsby, for Tom remained "the polo player." for the rest of the evening.
"I've never met so many celebrities!" Daisy exclaimed. "I liked that
man--what was his name?--with the sort of blue nose." Gatsby identified him,
adding that he was a small producer. "Well, I liked him anyhow." "I'd a
little rather not be the polo player," said Tom pleasantly, "I'd rather look
at all these famous people in--in oblivion." Daisy and Gatsby danced. I
remember being surprised by his graceful, conservative fox-trot--I had never
seen him dance before. Then they sauntered over to my house and sat on the
steps for half an hour, while at her request I remained watchfully in the
garden. "In case there's a fire or a flood," she explained, "or any act of
God." Tom appeared from his oblivion as we were sitting down to supper
together. "Do you mind if I eat with some people over here?" he said. "A
fellow's getting off some funny stuff." "Go ahead," answered Daisy genially,
"and if you want to take down any addresses here's my little gold pencil." .
. . she looked around after a moment and told me the girl was "common but
pretty," and I knew that except for the half-hour she'd been alone with
Gatsby she wasn't having a good time. We were at a particularly tipsy table.
That was my fault--Gatsby had been called to the phone, and I'd enjoyed
these same people only two weeks before. But what had amused me then turned
septic on the air now. "How do you feel, Miss Baedeker?" The girl addressed
was trying, unsuccessfully, to slump against my shoulder. At this inquiry
she sat up and opened her eyes. "Wha'?" A massive and lethargic woman, who
had been urging Daisy to play golf with her at the local club to-morrow,
spoke in Miss Baedeker's defence: "Oh, she's all right now. When she's had
five or six cocktails she always starts screaming like that. I tell her she
ought to leave it alone." "I do leave it alone," affirmed the accused
hollowly. "We heard you yelling, so I said to Doc Civet here: 'There's
somebody that needs your help, Doc.'" "She's much obliged, I'm sure," said
another friend, without gratitude. "But you got her dress all wet when you
stuck her head in the pool." "Anything I hate is to get my head stuck in a
pool," mumbled Miss Baedeker. "They almost drowned me once over in New
Jersey." "Then you ought to leave it alone," countered Doctor Civet. "Speak
for yourself!" cried Miss Baedeker violently. "Your hand shakes. I wouldn't
let you operate on me!" It was like that. Almost the last thing I remember
was standing with Daisy and watching the moving-picture director and his
Star. They were still under the white plum tree and their faces were
touching except for a pale, thin ray of moonlight between. It occurred to me
that he had been very slowly bending toward her all evening to attain this
proximity, and even while I watched I saw him stoop one ultimate degree and
kiss at her cheek. "I like her," said Daisy, "I think she's lovely." But the
rest offended her--and inarguably, because it wasn't a gesture but an
emotion. She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented "place." that
Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village--appalled by its
raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate
that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She
saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand. I sat
on the front steps with them while they waited for their car. It was dark
here in front; only the bright door sent ten square feet of light volleying
out into the soft black morning. Sometimes a shadow moved against a
dressing-room blind above, gave way to another shadow, an indefinite
procession of shadows, who rouged and powdered in an invisible glass. "Who
is this Gatsby anyhow?" demanded Tom suddenly. "Some big bootlegger?"
"Where'd you hear that?" I inquired. "I didn't hear it. I imagined it. A lot
of these newly rich people are just big bootleggers, you know." "Not
Gatsby," I said shortly. He was silent for a moment. The pebbles of the
drive crunched under his feet. "Well, he certainly must have strained
himself to get this menagerie together." A breeze stirred the gray haze of
Daisy's fur collar. "At least they're more interesting than the people we
know," she said with an effort. "You didn't look so interested." "Well, I
was." Tom laughed and turned to me. "Did you notice Daisy's face when that
girl asked her to put her under a cold shower?" Daisy began to sing with the
music in a husky, rhythmic whisper, bringing out a meaning in each word that
it had never had before and would never have again. When the melody rose,
her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have,
and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.
"Lots of people come who haven't been invited," she said suddenly. "That
girl hadn't been invited. They simply force their way in and he's too polite
to object." "I'd like to know who he is and what he does," insisted Tom.
"And I think I'll make a point of finding out." "I can tell you right now,"
she answered. "He owned some drug-stores, a lot of drug-stores. He built
them up himself." The dilatory limousine came rolling up the drive. "Good
night, Nick," said Daisy. Her glance left me and sought the lighted top of
the steps, where THREE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING, a neat, sad little waltz of
that year, was drifting out the open door. After all, in the very casualness
of Gatsby's party there were romantic possibilities totally absent from her
world. What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling her back
inside? What would happen now in the dim, incalculable hours? Perhaps some
unbelievable guest would arrive, a person infinitely rare and to be
marvelled at, some authentically radiant young girl who with one fresh
glance at Gatsby, one moment of magical encounter, would blot out those five
years of unwavering devotion. I stayed late that night, Gatsby asked me to
wait until he was free, and I lingered in the garden until the inevitable
swimming party had run up, chilled and exalted, from the black beach, until
the lights were extinguished in the guest-rooms overhead. When he came down
the steps at last the tanned skin was drawn unusually tight on his face, and
his eyes were bright and tired. "She didn't like it," he said immediately.
"Of course she did." "She didn't like it," he insisted. "She didn't have a
good time." He was silent, and I guessed at his unutterable depression. "I
feel far away from her," he said. "It's hard to make her understand." "You
mean about the dance?" "The dance?" He dismissed all the dances he had given
with a snap of his fingers. "Old sport, the dance is unimportant." He wanted
nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: "I never loved
you." After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could
decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that,
after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from
her house--just as if it were five years ago. "And she doesn't understand,"
he said. "She used to be able to understand. We'd sit for hours----" He
broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and
discarded favors and crushed flowers. "I wouldn't ask too much of her," I
ventured. "You can't repeat the past." "Can't repeat the past?" he cried
incredulously. "Why of course you can!" He looked around him wildly, as if
the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of
his hand. "I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before," he said,
nodding determinedly. "She'll see." He talked a lot about the past, and I
gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps,
that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered
since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go
over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was. . . . . . . One
autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when
the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees
and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned
toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement
in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the
houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle
among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of
the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the
trees--he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could
suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. His
heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He
knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions
to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of
God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had
been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she
blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. Through
all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of
something--an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard
somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my
mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more
struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound,
and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever. Chapter 7 It
was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights in his
house failed to go on one Saturday night--and, as obscurely as it had begun,
his career as Trimalchio was over. Only gradually did I become aware that
the automobiles which turned expectantly into his drive stayed for just a
minute and then drove sulkily away. Wondering if he were sick I went over to
find out--an unfamiliar butler with a villainous face squinted at me
suspiciously from the door. "Is Mr. Gatsby sick?" "Nope." After a pause he
added "sir." in a dilatory, grudging way. "I hadn't seen him around, and I
was rather worried. Tell him Mr. Carraway came over." "Who?" he demanded
rudely. "Carraway." "Carraway. All right, I'll tell him." Abruptly he
slammed the door. My Finn informed me that Gatsby had dismissed every
servant in his house a week ago and replaced them with half a dozen others,
who never went into West Egg Village to be bribed by the tradesmen, but
ordered moderate supplies over the telephone. The grocery boy reported that
the kitchen looked like a pigsty, and the general opinion in the village was
that the new people weren't servants at all. Next day Gatsby called me on
the phone. "Going away?" I inquired. "No, old sport." "I hear you fired all
your servants." "I wanted somebody who wouldn't gossip. Daisy comes over
quite often--in the afternoons." So the whole caravansary had fallen in like
a card house at the disapproval in her eyes. "They're some people Wolfshiem
wanted to do something for. They're all brothers and sisters. They used to
run a small hotel." "I see." He was calling up at Daisy's request--would I
come to lunch at her house to-morrow? Miss Baker would be there. Half an
hour later Daisy herself telephoned and seemed relieved to find that I was
coming. Something was up. And yet I couldn't believe that they would choose
this occasion for a scene--especially for the rather harrowing scene that
Gatsby had outlined in the garden. The next day was broiling, almost the
last, certainly the warmest, of the summer. As my train emerged from the
tunnel into sunlight, only the hot whistles of the National Biscuit Company
broke the simmering hush at noon. The straw seats of the car hovered on the
edge of combustion; the woman next to me perspired delicately for a while
into her white shirtwaist, and then, as her newspaper dampened under her
fingers, lapsed despairingly into deep heat with a desolate cry. Her
pocket-book slapped to the floor. "Oh, my!" she gasped. I picked it up with
a weary bend and handed it back to her, holding it at arm's length and by
the extreme tip of the corners to indicate that I had no designs upon
it--but every one near by, including the woman, suspected me just the same.
"Hot!" said the conductor to familiar faces. "Some weather! hot! hot! hot!
Is it hot enough for you? Is it hot? Is it . . . ?" My commutation ticket
came back to me with a dark stain from his hand. That any one should care in
this heat whose flushed lips he kissed, whose head made damp the pajama
pocket over his heart! . . . Through the hall of the Buchanans' house blew a
faint wind, carrying the sound of the telephone bell out to Gatsby and me as
we waited at the door. "The master's body!" roared the butler into the
mouthpiece. "I'm sorry, madame, but we can't furnish it--it's far too hot to
touch this noon!" What he really said was: "Yes . . . yes . . . I'll see."
He set down the receiver and came toward us, glistening slightly, to take
our stiff straw hats. "Madame expects you in the salon!" he cried,
needlessly indicating the direction. In this heat every extra gesture was an
affront to the common store of life. The room, shadowed well with awnings,
was dark and cool. Daisy and Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver
idols weighing down their own white dresses against the singing breeze of
the fans. "We can't move," they said together. Jordan's fingers, powdered
white over their tan, rested for a moment in mine. "And Mr. Thomas Buchanan,
the athlete?" I inquired. Simultaneously I heard his voice, gruff, muffled,
husky, at the hall telephone. Gatsby stood in the centre of the crimson
carpet and gazed around with fascinated eyes. Daisy watched him and laughed,
her sweet, exciting laugh; a tiny gust of powder rose from her bosom into
the air. "The rumor is," whispered Jordan, "that that's Tom's girl on the
telephone." We were silent. The voice in the hall rose high with annoyance:
"Very well, then, I won't sell you the car at all. . . . I'm under no
obligations to you at all . . . and as for your bothering me about it at
lunch time, I won't stand that at all!" "Holding down the receiver," said
Daisy cynically. "No, he's not," I assured her. "It's a bona-fide deal. I
happen to know about it." Tom flung open the door, blocked out its space for
a moment with his thick body, and hurried into the room. "Mr. Gatsby!" He
put out his broad, flat hand with well-concealed dislike. "I'm glad to see
you, sir. . . . Nick. . . ." "Make us a cold drink," cried Daisy. As he left
the room again she got up and went over to Gatsby and pulled his face down,
kissing him on the mouth. "You know I love you," she murmured. "You forget
there's a lady present," said Jordan. Daisy looked around doubtfully. "You
kiss Nick too." "What a low, vulgar girl!" "I don't care!" cried Daisy, and
began to clog on the brick fireplace. Then she remembered the heat and sat
down guiltily on the couch just as a freshly laundered nurse leading a
little girl came into the room. "Bles-sed pre-cious," she crooned, holding
out her arms. "Come to your own mother that loves you." The child,
relinquished by the nurse, rushed across the room and rooted shyly into her
mother's dress. "The bles-sed pre-cious! Did mother get powder on your old
yellowy hair? Stand up now, and say--How-de-do." Gatsby and I in turn leaned
down and took the small, reluctant hand. Afterward he kept looking at the
child with surprise. I don't think he had ever really believed in its
existence before. "I got dressed before luncheon," said the child, turning
eagerly to Daisy. "That's because your mother wanted to show you off." Her
face bent into the single wrinkle of the small, white neck. "You dream, you.
You absolute little dream." "Yes," admitted the child calmly. "Aunt Jordan's
got on a white dress too." "How do you like mother's friends?" Daisy turned
her around so that she faced Gatsby. "Do you think they're pretty?" "Where's
Daddy?" "She doesn't look like her father," explained Daisy. "She looks like
me. She's got my hair and shape of the face." Daisy sat back upon the couch.
The nurse took a step forward and held out her hand. "Come, Pammy."
"Good-by, sweetheart!" With a reluctant backward glance the well-disciplined
child held to her nurse's hand and was pulled out the door, just as Tom came
back, preceding four gin rickeys that clicked full of ice. Gatsby took up
his drink. "They certainly look cool," he said, with visible tension. We
drank in long, greedy swallows. "I read somewhere that the sun's getting
hotter every year," said Tom genially. "It seems that pretty soon the
earth's going to fall into the sun--or wait a minute--it's just the
opposite--the sun's getting colder every year. "Come outside," he suggested
to Gatsby, "I'd like you to have a look at the place." I went with them out
to the veranda. On the green Sound, stagnant in the heat, one small sail
crawled slowly toward the fresher sea. Gatsby's eyes followed it
momentarily; he raised his hand and pointed across the bay. "I'm right
across from you." "So you are." Our eyes lifted over the rose-beds and the
hot lawn and the weedy refuse of the dog-days along-shore. Slowly the white
wings of the boat moved against the blue cool limit of the sky. Ahead lay
the scalloped ocean and the abounding blessed isles. "There's sport for
you," said Tom, nodding. "I'd like to be out there with him for about an
hour." We had luncheon in the dining-room, darkened too against the heat,
and drank down nervous gayety with the cold ale. "What'll we do with
ourselves this afternoon?" cried Daisy, "and the day after that, and the
next thirty years?" "Don't be morbid," Jordan said. "Life starts all over
again when it gets crisp in the fall." "But it's so hot," insisted Daisy, on
the verge of tears, "and everything's so confused. Let's all go to town!"
Her voice struggled on through the heat, beating against it, molding its
senselessness into forms. "I've heard of making a garage out of a stable,"
Tom was saying to Gatsby, "but I'm the first man who ever made a stable out
of a garage." "Who wants to go to town?" demanded Daisy insistently.
Gatsby's eyes floated toward her. "Ah," she cried, "you look so cool." Their
eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an
effort she glanced down at the table. "You always look so cool," she
repeated. She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw. He was
astounded. His mouth opened a little, and he looked at Gatsby, and then back
at Daisy as if he had just recognized her as some one he knew a long time
ago. "You resemble the advertisement of the man," she went on innocently.
"You know the advertisement of the man----" "All right," broke in Tom
quickly, "I'm perfectly willing to go to town. Come on--we're all going to
town." He got up, his eyes still flashing between Gatsby and his wife. No
one moved. "Come on!" His temper cracked a little. "What's the matter,
anyhow? If we're going to town, let's start." His hand, trembling with his
effort at self-control, bore to his lips the last of his glass of ale.
Daisy's voice got us to our feet and out on to the blazing gravel drive.
"Are we just going to go?" she objected. "Like this? Aren't we going to let
any one smoke a cigarette first?" "Everybody smoked all through lunch." "Oh,
let's have fun," she begged him. "It's too hot to fuss." He didn't answer.
"Have it your own way," she said. "Come on, Jordan." They went up-stairs to
get ready while we three men stood there shuffling the hot pebbles with our
feet. A silver curve of the moon hovered already in the western sky. Gatsby
started to speak, changed his mind, but not before Tom wheeled and faced him
expectantly. "Have you got your stables here?" asked Gatsby with an effort.
"About a quarter of a mile down the road." "Oh." A pause. "I don't see the
idea of going to town," broke out Tom savagely. "Women get these notions in
their heads----" "Shall we take anything to drink?" called Daisy from an
upper window. "I'll get some whiskey," answered Tom. He went inside. Gatsby
turned to me rigidly: "I can't say anything in his house, old sport." "She's
got an indiscreet voice," I remarked. "It's full of----" I hesitated. "Her
voice is full of money," he said suddenly. That was it. I'd never understood
before. It was full of money--that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and
fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it. . . . high in a white
palace the king's daughter, the golden girl. . . . Tom came out of the house
wrapping a quart bottle in a towel, followed by Daisy and Jordan wearing
small tight hats of metallic cloth and carrying light capes over their arms.
"Shall we all go in my car?" suggested Gatsby. He felt the hot, green
leather of the seat. "I ought to have left it in the shade." "Is it standard
shift?" demanded Tom. "Yes." "Well, you take my coupe and let me drive your
car to town." The suggestion was distasteful to Gatsby. "I don't think
there's much gas," he objected. "Plenty of gas," said Tom boisterously. He
looked at the gauge. "And if it runs out I can stop at a drug-store. You can
buy anything at a drug-store nowadays." A pause followed this apparently
pointless remark. Daisy looked at Tom frowning, and an indefinable
expression, at once definitely unfamiliar and vaguely recognizable, as if I
had only heard it described in words, passed over Gatsby's face. "Come on,
Daisy," said Tom, pressing her with his hand toward Gatsby's car. "I'll take
you in this circus wagon." He opened the door, but she moved out from the
circle of his arm. "You take Nick and Jordan. We'll follow you in the
coupe." She walked close to Gatsby, touching his coat with her hand. Jordan
and Tom and I got into the front seat of Gatsby's car, Tom pushed the
unfamiliar gears tentatively, and we shot off into the oppressive heat,
leaving them out of sight behind. "Did you see that?" demanded Tom. "See
what?" He looked at me keenly, realizing that Jordan and I must have known
all along. "You think I'm pretty dumb, don't you?" he suggested. "Perhaps I
am, but I have a--almost a second sight, sometimes, that tells me what to
do. Maybe you don't believe that, but science----" He paused. The immediate
contingency overtook him, pulled him back from the edge of the theoretical
abyss. "I've made a small investigation of this fellow," he continued. "I
could have gone deeper if I'd known----" "Do you mean you've been to a
medium?" inquired Jordan humorously. "What?" Confused, he stared at us as we
laughed. "A medium?" "About Gatsby." "About Gatsby! No, I haven't. I said
I'd been making a small investigation of his past." "And you found he was an
Oxford man," said Jordan helpfully. "An Oxford man!" He was incredulous.
"Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit." "Nevertheless he's an Oxford man."
"Oxford, New Mexico," snorted Tom contemptuously, "or something like that."
"Listen, Tom. If you're such a snob, why did you invite him to lunch?"
demanded Jordan crossly. "Daisy invited him; she knew him before we were
married--God knows where!" We were all irritable now with the fading ale,
and aware of it we drove for a while in silence. Then as Doctor T. J.
Eckleburg's faded eyes came into sight down the road, I remembered Gatsby's
caution about gasoline. "We've got enough to get us to town," said Tom. "But
there's a garage right here," objected Jordan. "I don't want to get stalled
in this baking heat." Tom threw on both brakes impatiently, and we slid to
an abrupt dusty stop under Wilson's sign. After a moment the proprietor
emerged from the interior of his establishment and gazed hollow-eyed at the
car. "Let's have some gas!" cried Tom roughly. "What do you think we stopped
for--to admire the view?" "I'm sick," said Wilson without moving. "Been sick
all day." "What's the matter?" "I'm all run down." "Well, shall I help
myself?" Tom demanded. "You sounded well enough on the phone." With an
effort Wilson left the shade and support of the doorway and, breathing hard,
unscrewed the cap of the tank. In the sunlight his face was green. "I didn't
mean to interrupt your lunch," he said. "But I need money pretty bad, and I
was wondering what you were going to do with your old car." "How do you like
this one?" inquired Tom. "I bought it last week." "It's a nice yellow one,"
said Wilson, as he strained at the handle. "Like to buy it?" "Big chance,"
Wilson smiled faintly. "No, but I could make some money on the other." "What
do you want money for, all of a sudden?" "I've been here too long. I want to
get away. My wife and I want to go West." "Your wife does," exclaimed Tom,
startled. "She's been talking about it for ten years." He rested for a
moment against the pump, shading his eyes. "And now she's going whether she
wants to or not. I'm going to get her away." The coupe flashed by us with a
flurry of dust and the flash of a waving hand. "What do I owe you?" demanded
Tom harshly. "I just got wised up to something funny the last two days,"
remarked Wilson. "That's why I want to get away. That's why I been bothering
you about the car." "What do I owe you?" "Dollar twenty." The relentless
beating heat was beginning to confuse me and I had a bad moment there before
I realized that so far his suspicions hadn't alighted on Tom. He had
discovered that Myrtle had some sort of life apart from him in another
world, and the shock had made him physically sick. I stared at him and then
at Tom, who had made a parallel discovery less than an hour before--and it
occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or
race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well. Wilson
was so sick that he looked guilty, unforgivably guilty--as if he had just
got some poor girl with child. "I'll let you have that car," said Tom. "I'll
send it over to-morrow afternoon." That locality was always vaguely
disquieting, even in the broad glare of afternoon, and now I turned my head
as though I had been warned of something behind. Over the ashheaps the giant
eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg kept their vigil, but I perceived, after a
moment, that other eyes were regarding us with peculiar intensity from less
than twenty feet away. In one of the windows over the garage the curtains
had been moved aside a little, and Myrtle Wilson was peering down at the
car. So engrossed was she that she had no consciousness of being observed,
and one emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly
developing picture. Her expression was curiously familiar--it was an
expression I had often seen on women's faces, but on Myrtle Wilson's face it
seemed purposeless and inexplicable until I realized that her eyes, wide
with jealous terror, were fixed not on Tom, but on Jordan Baker, whom she
took to be his wife. There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple
mind, and as we drove away Tom was feeling the hot whips of panic. His wife
and his mistress, until an hour ago secure and inviolate, were slipping
precipitately from his control. Instinct made him step on the accelerator
with the double purpose of overtaking Daisy and leaving Wilson behind, and
we sped along toward Astoria at fifty miles an hour, until, among the
spidery girders of the elevated, we came in sight of the easy-going blue
coupe. "Those big movies around Fiftieth Street are cool," suggested Jordan.
"I love New York on summer afternoons when every one's away. There's
something very sensuous about it--overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits
were going to fall into your hands." The word "sensuous" had the effect of
further disquieting Tom, but before he could invent a protest the coupe came
to a stop, and Daisy signaled us to draw up alongside. "Where are we going?"
she cried. "How about the movies?" "It's so hot," she complained. "You go.
We'll ride around and meet you after." With an effort her wit rose faintly,
"We'll meet you on some corner. I'll be the man smoking two cigarettes." "We
can't argue about it here," Tom said impatiently, as a truck gave out a
cursing whistle behind us. "You follow me to the south side of Central Park,
in front of the Plaza." Several times he turned his head and looked back for
their car, and if the traffic delayed them he slowed up until they came into
sight. I think he was afraid they would dart down a side street and out of
his life forever. But they didn't. And we all took the less explicable step
of engaging the parlor of a suite in the Plaza Hotel. The prolonged and
tumultuous argument that ended by herding us into that room eludes me,
though I have a sharp physical memory that, in the course of it, my
underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around my legs and intermittent
beads of sweat raced cool across my back. The notion originated with Daisy's
suggestion that we hire five bath-rooms and take cold baths, and then
assumed more tangible form as "a place to have a mint julep." Each of us
said over and over that it was a "crazy idea."--we all talked at once to a
baffled clerk and thought, or pretended to think, that we were being very
funny. . . . The room was large and stifling, and, though it was already
four o'clock, opening the windows admitted Only a gust of hot shrubbery from
the Park. Daisy went to the mirror and stood with her back to us, fixing her
hair. "It's a swell suite," whispered Jordan respectfully, and every one
laughed. "Open another window," commanded Daisy, without turning around.
"There aren't any more." "Well, we'd better telephone for an axe----" "The
thing to do is to forget about the heat," said Tom impatiently. "You make it
ten times worse by crabbing about it." He unrolled the bottle of whiskey
from the towel and put it on the table. "Why not let her alone, old sport?"
remarked Gatsby. "You're the one that wanted to come to town." There was a
moment of silence. The telephone book slipped from its nail and splashed to
the floor, whereupon Jordan whispered, "Excuse me."--but this time no one
laughed. "I'll pick it up," I offered. "I've got it." Gatsby examined the
parted string, muttered "Hum!" in an interested way, and tossed the book on
a chair. "That's a great expression of yours, isn't it?" said Tom sharply.
"What is?" "All this 'old sport' business. Where'd you pick that up?" "Now
see here, Tom," said Daisy, turning around from the mirror, "if you're going
to make personal remarks I won't stay here a minute. Call up and order some
ice for the mint julep." As Tom took up the receiver the compressed heat
exploded into sound and we were listening to the portentous chords of
Mendelssohn's Wedding March from the ballroom below. "Imagine marrying
anybody in this heat!" cried Jordan dismally. "Still--I was married in the
middle of June," Daisy remembered, "Louisville in June! Somebody fainted.
Who was it fainted, Tom?" "Biloxi," he answered shortly. "A man named
Biloxi. 'blocks' Biloxi, and he made boxes--that's a fact--and he was from
Biloxi, Tennessee." "They carried him into my house," appended Jordan,
"because we lived just two doors from the church. And he stayed three weeks,
until Daddy told him he had to get out. The day after he left Daddy died."
After a moment she added as if she might have sounded irreverent, "There
wasn't any connection." "I used to know a Bill Biloxi from Memphis," I
remarked. "That was his cousin. I knew his whole family history before he
left. He gave me an aluminum putter that I use to-day." The music had died
down as the ceremony began and now a long cheer floated in at the window,
followed by intermittent cries of "Yea-ea-ea!" and finally by a burst of
jazz as the dancing began. "We're getting old," said Daisy. "If we were
young we'd rise and dance." "Remember Biloxi," Jordan warned her. "Where'd
you know him, Tom?" "Biloxi?" He concentrated with an effort. "I didn't know
him. He was a friend of Daisy's." "He was not," she denied. "I'd never seen
him before. He came down in the private car." "Well, he said he knew you. He
said he was raised in Louisville. Asa Bird brought him around at the last
minute and asked if we had room for him." Jordan smiled. "He was probably
bumming his way home. He told me he was president of your class at Yale."
Tom and I looked at each other blankly. "Biloxi?" "First place, we didn't
have any president----" Gatsby's foot beat a short, restless tattoo and Tom
eyed him suddenly. "By the way, Mr. Gatsby, I understand you're an Oxford
man." "Not exactly." "Oh, yes, I understand you went to Oxford." "Yes--I
went there." A pause. Then Tom's voice, incredulous and insulting: "You must
have gone there about the time Biloxi went to New Haven." Another pause. A
waiter knocked and came in with crushed mint and ice but, the silence was
unbroken by his "thank you." and the soft closing of the door. This
tremendous detail was to be cleared up at last. "I told you I went there,"
said Gatsby. "I heard you, but I'd like to know when." "It was in
nineteen-nineteen, I only stayed five months. That's why I can't really call
myself an Oxford man." Tom glanced around to see if we mirrored his
unbelief. But we were all looking at Gatsby. "It was an opportunity they
gave to some of the officers after the Armistice," he continued. "We could
go to any of the universities in England or France." I wanted to get up and
slap him on the back. I had one of those renewals of complete faith in him
that I'd experienced before. Daisy rose, smiling faintly, and went to the
table. "Open the whiskey, Tom," she ordered, "and I'll make you a mint
julep. Then you won't seem so stupid to yourself. . . . Look at the mint!"
"Wait a minute," snapped Tom, "I want to ask Mr. Gatsby one more question."
"Go on," Gatsby said politely. "What kind of a row are you trying to cause
in my house anyhow?" They were out in the open at last and Gatsby was
content. "He isn't causing a row." Daisy looked desperately from one to the
other. "You're causing a row. Please have a little self-control."
"Self-control!" Repeated Tom incredulously. "I suppose the latest thing is
to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if
that's the idea you can count me out. . . . Nowadays people begin by
sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they'll throw
everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white."
Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the
last barrier of civilization. "We're all white here," murmured Jordan. "I
know I'm not very popular. I don't give big parties. I suppose you've got to
make your house into a pigsty in order to have any friends--in the modern
world." Angry as I was, as we all were, I was tempted to laugh whenever he
opened his mouth. The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.
"I've got something to tell YOU, old sport----" began Gatsby. But Daisy
guessed at his intention. "Please don't!" she interrupted helplessly.
"Please let's all go home. Why don't we all go home?" "That's a good idea."
I got up. "Come on, Tom. Nobody wants a drink." "I want to know what Mr.
Gatsby has to tell me." "Your wife doesn't love you," said Gatsby. "She's
never loved you. She loves me." "You must be crazy!" exclaimed Tom
automatically. Gatsby sprang to his feet, vivid with excitement. "She never
loved you, do you hear?" he cried. "She only married you because I was poor
and she was tired of waiting for me. It was a terrible mistake, but in her
heart she never loved any one except me!" At this point Jordan and I tried
to go, but Tom and Gatsby insisted with competitive firmness that we
remain--as though neither of them had anything to conceal and it would be a
privilege to partake vicariously of their emotions. "Sit down, Daisy," Tom's
voice groped unsuccessfully for the paternal note. "What's been going on? I
want to hear all about it." "I told you what's been going on," said Gatsby.
"Going on for five years--and you didn't know." Tom turned to Daisy sharply.
"You've been seeing this fellow for five years?" "Not seeing," said Gatsby.
"No, we couldn't meet. But both of us loved each other all that time, old
sport, and you didn't know. I used to laugh sometimes."--but there was no
laughter in his eyes----" to think that you didn't know." "Oh--that's all."
Tom tapped his thick fingers together like a clergyman and leaned back in
his chair. "You're crazy!" he exploded. "I can't speak about what happened
five years ago, because I didn't know Daisy then--and I'll be damned if I
see how you got within a mile of her unless you brought the groceries to the
back door. But all the rest of that's a God damned lie. Daisy loved me when
she married me and she loves me now." "No," said Gatsby, shaking his head.
"She does, though. The trouble is that sometimes she gets foolish ideas in
her head and doesn't know what she's doing." He nodded sagely. "And what's
more, I love Daisy too. Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool
of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time."
"You're revolting," said Daisy. She turned to me, and her voice, dropping an
octave lower, filled the room with thrilling scorn: "Do you know why we left
Chicago? I'm surprised that they didn't treat you to the story of that
little spree." Gatsby walked over and stood beside her. "Daisy, that's all
over now," he said earnestly. "It doesn't matter any more. Just tell him the
truth--that you never loved him--and it's all wiped out forever." She looked
at him blindly. "Why--how could I love him--possibly?" "You never loved
him." She hesitated. Her eyes fell on Jordan and me with a sort of appeal,
as though she realized at last what she was doing--and as though she had
never, all along, intended doing anything at all. But it was done now. It
was too late. "I never loved him," she said, with perceptible reluctance.
"Not at Kapiolani?" demanded Tom suddenly. "No." From the ballroom beneath,
muffled and suffocating chords were drifting up on hot waves of air. "Not
that day I carried you down from the Punch Bowl to keep your shoes dry?"
There was a husky tenderness in his tone. . . . "Daisy?" "Please don't." Her
voice was cold, but the rancor was gone from it. She looked at Gatsby.
"There, Jay," she said--but her hand as she tried to light a cigarette was
trembling. Suddenly she threw the cigarette and the burning match on the
carpet. "Oh, you want too much!" she cried to Gatsby. "I love you now--isn't
that enough? I can't help what's past." She began to sob helplessly. "I did
love him once--but I loved you too." Gatsby's eyes opened and closed. "You
loved me TOO?" he repeated. "Even that's a lie," said Tom savagely. "She
didn't know you were alive. Why--there're things between Daisy and me that
you'll never know, things that neither of us can ever forget." The words
seemed to bite physically into Gatsby. "I want to speak to Daisy alone," he
insisted. "She's all excited now----" "Even alone I can't say I never loved
Tom," she admitted in a pitiful voice. "It wouldn't be true." "Of course it
wouldn't," agreed Tom. She turned to her husband. "As if it mattered to
you," she said. "Of course it matters. I'm going to take better care of you
from now on." "You don't understand," said Gatsby, with a touch of panic.
"You're not going to take care of her any more." "I'm not?" Tom opened his
eyes wide and laughed. He could afford to control himself now. "Why's that?"
"Daisy's leaving you." "Nonsense." "I am, though," she said with a visible
effort. "She's not leaving me!" Tom's words suddenly leaned down over
Gatsby. "Certainly not for a common swindler who'd have to steal the ring he
put on her finger." "I won't stand this!" cried Daisy. "Oh, please let's get
out." "Who are you, anyhow?" broke out Tom. "You're one of that bunch that
hangs around with Meyer Wolfshiem--that much I happen to know. I've made a
little investigation into your affairs--and I'll carry it further
to-morrow." "You can suit yourself about that, old sport." said Gatsby
steadily. "I found out what your 'drug-stores' were." He turned to us and
spoke rapidly. "He and this Wolfshiem bought up a lot of side-street
drug-stores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter.
That's one of his little stunts. I picked him for a bootlegger the first
time I saw him, and I wasn't far wrong." "What about it?" said Gatsby
politely. "I guess your friend Walter Chase wasn't too proud to come in on
it." "And you left him in the lurch, didn't you? You let him go to jail for
a month over in New Jersey. God! You ought to hear Walter on the subject of
YOU." "He came to us dead broke. He was very glad to pick up some money, old
sport." "Don't you call me 'old sport'!" cried Tom. Gatsby said nothing.
"Walter could have you up on the betting laws too, but Wolfshiem scared him
into shutting his mouth." That unfamiliar yet recognizable look was back
again in Gatsby's face. "That drug-store business was just small change,"
continued Tom slowly, "but you've got something on now that Walter's afraid
to tell me about." I glanced at Daisy, who was staring terrified between
Gatsby and her husband, and at Jordan, who had begun to balance an invisible
but absorbing object on the tip of her chin. Then I turned back to
Gatsby--and was startled at his expression. He looked--and this is said in
all contempt for the babbled slander of his garden--as if he had "killed a
man." For a moment the set of his face could be described in just that
fantastic way. It passed, and he began to talk excitedly to Daisy, denying
everything, defending his name against accusations that had not been made.
But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he
gave that up, and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped
away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily,
undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room. The voice begged
again to go. "PLEASE, Tom! I can't stand this any more." Her frightened eyes
told that whatever intentions, whatever courage, she had had, were
definitely gone. "You two start on home, Daisy," said Tom. "In Mr. Gatsby's
car." She looked at Tom, alarmed now, but he insisted with magnanimous
scorn. "Go on. He won't annoy you. I think he realizes that his presumptuous
little flirtation is over." They were gone, without a word, snapped out,
made accidental, isolated, like ghosts, even from our pity. After a moment
Tom got up and began wrapping the unopened bottle of whiskey in the towel.
"Want any of this stuff? Jordan? . . . Nick?" I didn't answer. "Nick?" He
asked again. "What?" "Want any?" "No . . . I just remembered that to-day's
my birthday." I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing
road of a new decade. It was seven o'clock when we got into the coupe with
him and started for Long Island. Tom talked incessantly, exulting and
laughing, but his voice was as remote from Jordan and me as the foreign
clamor on the sidewalk or the tumult of the elevated overhead. Human
sympathy has its limits, and we were content to let all their tragic
arguments fade with the city lights behind. Thirty--the promise of a decade
of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case
of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike
Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As
we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat's
shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring
pressure of her hand. So we drove on toward death through the cooling
twilight. The young Greek, Michaelis, who ran the coffee joint beside the
ashheaps was the principal witness at the inquest. He had slept through the
heat until after five, when he strolled over to the garage, and found George
Wilson sick in his office--really sick, pale as his own pale hair and
shaking all over. Michaelis advised him to go to bed, but Wilson refused,
saying that he'd miss a lot of business if he did. While his neighbor was
trying to persuade him a violent racket broke out overhead. "I've got my
wife locked in up there," explained Wilson calmly. "She's going to stay
there till the day after to-morrow, and then we're going to move away."
Michaelis was astonished; they had been neighbors for four years, and Wilson
had never seemed faintly capable of such a statement. Generally he was one
of these worn-out men: when he wasn't working, he sat on a chair in the
doorway and stared at the people and the cars that passed along the road.
When any one spoke to him he invariably laughed in an agreeable, colorless
way. He was his wife's man and not his own. So naturally Michaelis tried to
find out what had happened, but Wilson wouldn't say a word--instead he began
to throw curious, suspicious glances at his visitor and ask him what he'd
been doing at certain times on certain days. Just as the latter was getting
uneasy, some workmen came past the door bound for his restaurant, and
Michaelis took the opportunity to get away, intending to come back later.
But he didn't. He supposed he forgot to, that's all. When he came outside
again, a little after seven, he was reminded of the conversation because he
heard Mrs. Wilson's voice, loud and scolding, down-stairs in the garage.
"Beat me!" he heard her cry. "Throw me down and beat me, you dirty little
coward!" A moment later she rushed out into the dusk, waving her hands and
shouting--before he could move from his door the business was over. The
"death car." as the newspapers called it, didn't stop; it came out of the
gathering darkness, wavered tragically for a moment, and then disappeared
around the next bend. Michaelis wasn't even sure of its color--he told the
first policeman that it was light green. The other car, the one going toward
New York, came to rest a hundred yards beyond, and its driver hurried back
to where Myrtle Wilson, her life violently extinguished, knelt in the road
and mingled her thick dark blood with the dust. Michaelis and this man
reached her first, but when they had torn open her shirtwaist, still damp
with perspiration, they saw that her left breast was swinging loose like a
flap, and there was no need to listen for the heart beneath. The mouth was
wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in
giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long. We saw the three
or four automobiles and the crowd when we were still some distance away.
"Wreck!" said Tom. "That's good. Wilson'll have a little business at last."
He slowed down, but still without any intention of stopping, until, as we
came nearer, the hushed, intent faces of the people at the garage door made
him automatically put on the brakes. "We'll take a look," he said
doubtfully, "just a look." I became aware now of a hollow, wailing sound
which issued incessantly from the garage, a sound which as we got out of the
coupe and walked toward the door resolved itself into the words "Oh, my
God!" uttered over and over in a gasping moan. "There's some bad trouble
here," said Tom excitedly. He reached up on tiptoes and peered over a circle
of heads into the garage, which was lit only by a yellow light in a swinging
wire basket overhead. Then he made a harsh sound in his throat, and with a
violent thrusting movement of his powerful arms pushed his way through. The
circle closed up again with a running murmur of expostulation; it was a
minute before I could see anything at all. Then new arrivals deranged the
line, and Jordan and I were pushed suddenly inside. Myrtle Wilson's body,
wrapped in a blanket, and then in another blanket, as though she suffered
from a chill in the hot night, lay on a work-table by the wall, and Tom,
with his back to us, was bending over it, motionless. Next to him stood a
motorcycle policeman taking down names with much sweat and correction in a
little book. At first I couldn't find the source of the high, groaning words
that echoed clamorously through the bare garage--then I saw Wilson standing
on the raised threshold of his office, swaying back and forth and holding to
the doorposts with both hands. Some man was talking to him in a low voice
and attempting, from time to time, to lay a hand on his shoulder, but Wilson
neither heard nor saw. His eyes would drop slowly from the swinging light to
the laden table by the wall, and then jerk back to the light again, and he
gave out incessantly his high, horrible call: "Oh, my Ga-od! Oh, my Ga-od!
oh, Ga-od! oh, my Ga-od!" Presently Tom lifted his head with a jerk and,
after staring around the garage with glazed eyes, addressed a mumbled
incoherent remark to the policeman. "M-a-y-." the policeman was saying,
"-o----" "No, r-." corrected the man, "M-a-v-r-o----" "Listen to me!"
muttered Tom fiercely. "r" said the policeman, "o----" "g----" "g----" He
looked up as Tom's broad hand fell sharply on his shoulder. "What you want,
fella?" "What happened?--that's what I want to know." "Auto hit her.
Ins'antly killed." "Instantly killed," repeated Tom, staring. "She ran out
ina road. Son-of-a-bitch didn't even stopus car." "There was two cars," said
Michaelis, "one comin', one goin', see?" "Going where?" asked the policeman
keenly. "One goin' each way. Well, she."--his hand rose toward the blankets
but stopped half way and fell to his side----" she ran out there an' the one
comin' from N'york knock right into her, goin' thirty or forty miles an
hour." "What's the name of this place here?" demanded the officer. "Hasn't
got any name." A pale well-dressed negro stepped near. "It was a yellow
car," he said, "big yellow car. New." "See the accident?" asked the
policeman. "No, but the car passed me down the road, going faster'n forty.
Going fifty, sixty." "Come here and let's have your name. Look out now. I
want to get his name." Some words of this conversation must have reached
Wilson, swaying in the office door, for suddenly a new theme found voice
among his gasping cries: "You don't have to tell me what kind of car it was!
I know what kind of car it was!" Watching Tom, I saw the wad of muscle back
of his shoulder tighten under his coat. He walked quickly over to Wilson
and, standing in front of him, seized him firmly by the upper arms. "You've
got to pull yourself together," he said with soothing gruffness. Wilson's
eyes fell upon Tom; he started up on his tiptoes and then would have
collapsed to his knees had not Tom held him upright. "Listen," said Tom,
shaking him a little. "I just got here a minute ago, from New York. I was
bringing you that coupe we've been talking about. That yellow car I was
driving this afternoon wasn't mine--do you hear? I haven't seen it all
afternoon." Only the negro and I were near enough to hear what he said, but
the policeman caught something in the tone and looked over with truculent
eyes. "What's all that?" he demanded. "I'm a friend of his." Tom turned his
head but kept his hands firm on Wilson's body. "He says he knows the car
that did it . . . it was a yellow car." Some dim impulse moved the policeman
to look suspiciously at Tom. "And what color's your car?" "It's a blue car,
a coupe." "We've come straight from New York," I said. Some one who had been
driving a little behind us confirmed this, and the policeman turned away.
"Now, if you'll let me have that name again correct----" Picking up Wilson
like a doll, Tom carried him into the office, set him down in a chair, and
came back. "If somebody'll come here and sit with him," he snapped
authoritatively. He watched while the two men standing closest glanced at
each other and went unwillingly into the room. Then Tom shut the door on
them and came down the single step, his eyes avoiding the table. As he
passed close to me he whispered: "Let's get out." Self-consciously, with his
authoritative arms breaking the way, we pushed through the still gathering
crowd, passing a hurried doctor, case in hand, who had been sent for in wild
hope half an hour ago. Tom drove slowly until we were beyond the bend--then
his foot came down hard, and the coupe raced along through the night. In a
little while I heard a low husky sob, and saw that the tears were
overflowing down his face. "The God damned coward!" he whimpered. "He didn't
even stop his car." The Buchanans' house floated suddenly toward us through
the dark rustling trees. Tom stopped beside the porch and looked up at the
second floor, where two windows bloomed with light among the vines. "Daisy's
home," he said. As we got out of the car he glanced at me and frowned
slightly. "I ought to have dropped you in West Egg, Nick. There's nothing we
can do to-night." A change had come over him, and he spoke gravely, and with
decision. As we walked across the moonlight gravel to the porch he disposed
of the situation in a few brisk phrases. "I'll telephone for a taxi to take
you home, and while you're waiting you and Jordan better go in the kitchen
and have them get you some supper--if you want any." He opened the door.
"Come in." "No, thanks. But I'd be glad if you'd order me the taxi. I'll
wait outside." Jordan put her hand on my arm. "Won't you come in, Nick?"
"No, thanks." I was feeling a little sick and I wanted to be alone. But
Jordan lingered for a moment more. "It's only half-past nine," she said. I'd
be damned if I'd go in; I'd had enough of all of them for one day, and
suddenly that included Jordan too. She must have seen something of this in
my expression, for she turned abruptly away and ran up the porch steps into
the house. I sat down for a few minutes with my head in my hands, until I
heard the phone taken up inside and the butler's voice calling a taxi. Then
I walked slowly down the drive away from the house, intending to wait by the
gate. I hadn't gone twenty yards when I heard my name and Gatsby stepped
from between two bushes into the path. I must have felt pretty weird by that
time, because I could think of nothing except the luminosity of his pink
suit under the moon. "What are you doing?" I inquired. "Just standing here,
old sport." Somehow, that seemed a despicable occupation. For all I knew he
was going to rob the house in a moment; I wouldn't have been surprised to
see sinister faces, the faces of 'Wolfshiem's people,' behind him in the
dark shrubbery. "Did you see any trouble on the road?" he asked after a
minute. "Yes." He hesitated. "Was she killed?" "Yes." "I thought so; I told
Daisy I thought so. It's better that the shock should all come at once. She
stood it pretty well." He spoke as if Daisy's reaction was the only thing
that mattered. "I got to West Egg by a side road," he went on, "and left the
car in my garage. I don't think anybody saw us, but of course I can't be
sure." I disliked him so much by this time that I didn't find it necessary
to tell him he was wrong. "Who was the woman?" he inquired. "Her name was
Wilson. Her husband owns the garage. How the devil did it happen?" "Well, I
tried to swing the wheel----" He broke off, and suddenly I guessed at the
truth. "Was Daisy driving?" "Yes," he said after a moment, "but of course
I'll say I was. You see, when we left New York she was very nervous and she
thought it would steady her to drive--and this woman rushed out at us just
as we were passing a car coming the other way. It all happened in a minute,
but it seemed to me that she wanted to speak to us, thought we were somebody
she knew. Well, first Daisy turned away from the woman toward the other car,
and then she lost her nerve and turned back. The second my hand reached the
wheel I felt the shock--it must have killed her instantly." "It ripped her
open----" "Don't tell me, old sport." He winced. "Anyhow--Daisy stepped on
it. I tried to make her stop, but she couldn't, so I pulled on the emergency
brake. Then she fell over into my lap and I drove on. "She'll be all right
to-morrow," he said presently. "I'm just going to wait here and see if he
tries to bother her about that unpleasantness this afternoon. She's locked
herself into her room, and if he tries any brutality she's going to turn the
light out and on again." "He won't touch her,' I said. "He's not thinking
about her." "I don't trust him, old sport." "How long are you going to
wait?" "All night, if necessary. Anyhow, till they all go to bed." A new
point of view occurred to me. Suppose Tom found out that Daisy had been
driving. He might think he saw a connection in it--he might think anything.
I looked at the house; there were two or three bright windows down-stairs
and the pink glow from Daisy's room on the second floor. "You wait here," I
said. "I'll see if there's any sign of a commotion." I walked back along the
border of the lawn, traversed the gravel softly, and tiptoed up the veranda
steps. The drawing-room curtains were open, and I saw that the room was
empty. Crossing the porch where we had dined that June night three months
before, I came to a small rectangle of light which I guessed was the pantry
window. The blind was drawn, but I found a rift at the sill. Daisy and Tom
were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table, with a plate of cold
fried chicken between them, and two bottles of ale. He was talking intently
across the table at her, and in his earnestness his hand had fallen upon and
covered her own. Once in a while she looked up at him and nodded in
agreement. They weren't happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken
or the ale--and yet they weren't unhappy either. There was an unmistakable
air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said that
they were conspiring together. As I tiptoed from the porch I heard my taxi
feeling its way along the dark road toward the house. Gatsby was waiting
where I had left him in the drive. "Is it all quiet up there?" he asked
anxiously. "Yes, it's all quiet." I hesitated. "You'd better come home and
get some sleep." He shook his head. "I want to wait here till Daisy goes to
bed. Good night, old sport." He put his hands in his coat pockets and turned
back eagerly to his scrutiny of the house, as though my presence marred the
sacredness of the vigil. So I walked away and left him standing there in the
moonlight--watching over nothing. Chapter 8 I couldn't sleep all night; a
fog-horn was groaning incessantly on the Sound, and I tossed half-sick
between grotesque reality and savage, frightening dreams. Toward dawn I
heard a taxi go up Gatsby's drive, and immediately I jumped out of bed and
began to dress--I felt that I had something to tell him, something to warn
him about, and morning would be too late. Crossing his lawn, I saw that his
front door was still open and he was leaning against a table in the hall,
heavy with dejection or sleep. "Nothing happened," he said wanly. "I waited,
and about four o'clock she came to the window and stood there for a minute
and then turned out the light." His house had never seemed so enormous to me
as it did that night when we hunted through the great rooms for cigarettes.
We pushed aside curtains that were like pavilions, and felt over innumerable
feet of dark wall for electric light switches--once I tumbled with a sort of
splash upon the keys of a ghostly piano. There was an inexplicable amount of
dust everywhere, and the rooms were musty, as though they hadn't been aired
for many days. I found the humidor on an unfamiliar table, with two stale,
dry cigarettes inside. Throwing open the French windows of the drawing-room,
we sat smoking out into the darkness. "You ought to go away," I said. "It's
pretty certain they'll trace your car." "Go away NOW, old sport?" "Go to
Atlantic City for a week, or up to Montreal." He wouldn't consider it. He
couldn't possibly leave Daisy until he knew what she was going to do. He was
clutching at some last hope and I couldn't bear to shake him free. It was
this night that he told me the strange story of his youth with Dan
Cody--told it to me because "Jay Gatsby." had broken up like glass against
Tom's hard malice, and the long secret extravaganza was played out. I think
that he would have acknowledged anything now, without reserve, but he wanted
to talk about Daisy. She was the first "nice" girl he had ever known. In
various unrevealed capacities he had come in contact with such people, but
always with indiscernible barbed wire between. He found her excitingly
desirable. He went to her house, at first with other officers from Camp
Taylor, then alone. It amazed him--he had never been in such a beautiful
house before. but what gave it an air of breathless intensity, was that
Daisy lived there--it was as casual a thing to her as his tent out at camp
was to him. There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms up-stairs
more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities
taking place through its corridors, and of romances that were not musty and
laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this
year's shining motor-cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely
withered. It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy--it
increased her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about the house,
pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions. But
he knew that he was in Daisy's house by a colossal accident. However
glorious might be his future as Jay Gatsby, he was at present a penniless
young man without a past, and at any moment the invisible cloak of his
uniform might slip from his shoulders. So he made the most of his time. He
took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously-- eventually he took
Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to
touch her hand. He might have despised himself, for he had certainly taken
her under false pretenses. I don't mean that he had traded on his phantom
millions, but he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he let
her believe that he was a person from much the same stratum as herself--that
he was fully able to take care of her. As a matter of fact, he had no such
facilities--he had no comfortable family standing behind him, and he was
liable at the whim of an impersonal government to be blown anywhere about
the world. But he didn't despise himself and it didn't turn out as he had
imagined. He had intended, probably, to take what he could and go--but now
he found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail. He knew
that Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn't realize just how extraordinary a
"nice" girl could be. She vanished into her rich house, into her rich, full
life, leaving Gatsby--nothing. He felt married to her, that was all. When
they met again, two days later, it was Gatsby who was breathless, who was,
somehow, betrayed. Her porch was bright with the bought luxury of
star-shine; the wicker of the settee squeaked fashionably as she turned
toward him and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth. She had caught a
cold, and it made her voice huskier and more charming than ever, and Gatsby
was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and
preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like
silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor. "I can't
describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport. I
even hoped for a while that she'd throw me over, but she didn't, because she
was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot because I knew different
things from her. . . . Well, there I was, 'way off my ambitions, getting
deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn't care. What was the
use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I
was going to do?" On the last afternoon before he went abroad, he sat with
Daisy in his arms for a long, silent time. It was a cold fall day, with fire
in the room and her cheeks flushed. Now and then she moved and he changed
his arm a little, and once he kissed her dark shining hair. The afternoon
had made them tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deep memory for the
long parting the next day promised. They had never been closer in their
month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when
she brushed silent lips against his coat's shoulder or when he touched the
end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep. He did
extraordinarily well in the war. He was a captain before he went to the
front, and following the Argonne battles he got his majority and the command
of the divisional machine-guns. After the Armistice he tried frantically to
get home, but some complication or misunderstanding sent him to Oxford
instead. He was worried now--there was a quality of nervous despair in
Daisy's letters. She didn't see why he couldn't come. She was feeling the
pressure of the world outside, and she wanted to see him and feel his
presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing
after all. For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of
orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm
of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes.
All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the BEALE STREET
BLUES. while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the
shining dust. At the gray tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed
incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and
there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor. Through this
twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she
was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and
drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress
tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed. And all the time
something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped
now, immediately--and the decision must be made by some force--of love, of
money, of unquestionable practicality--that was close at hand. That force
took shape in the middle of spring with the arrival of Tom Buchanan. There
was a wholesome bulkiness about his person and his position, and Daisy was
flattered. Doubtless there was a certain struggle and a certain relief. The
letter reached Gatsby while he was still at Oxford. It was dawn now on Long
Island and we went about opening the rest of the windows down-stairs,
filling the house with gray-turning, gold-turning light. The shadow of a
tree fell abruptly across the dew and ghostly birds began to sing among the
blue leaves. There was a slow, pleasant movement in the air, scarcely a
wind, promising a cool, lovely day. "I don't think she ever loved him."
Gatsby turned around from a window and looked at me challengingly. "You must
remember, old sport, she was very excited this afternoon. He told her those
things in a way that frightened her--that made it look as if I was some kind
of cheap sharper. And the result was she hardly knew what she was saying."
He sat down gloomily. "Of course she might have loved him just for a minute,
when they were first married--and loved me more even then, do you see?"
Suddenly he came out with a curious remark. "In any case," he said, "it was
just personal." What could you make of that, except to suspect some
intensity in his conception of the affair that couldn't be measured? He came
back from France when Tom and Daisy were still on their wedding trip, and
made a miserable but irresistible journey to Louisville on the last of his
army pay. He stayed there a week, walking the streets where their footsteps
had clicked together through the November night and revisiting the
out-of-the-way places to which they had driven in her white car. Just as
Daisy's house had always seemed to him more mysterious and gay than other
houses, so his idea of the city itself, even though she was gone from it,
was pervaded with a melancholy beauty. He left feeling that if he had
searched harder, he might have found her--that he was leaving her behind.
The day-coach--he was penniless now--was hot. He went out to the open
vestibule and sat down on a folding-chair, and the station slid away and the
backs of unfamiliar buildings moved by. Then out into the spring fields,
where a yellow trolley raced them for a minute with people in it who might
once have seen the pale magic of her face along the casual street. The track
curved and now it was going away from the sun, which as it sank lower,
seemed to spread itself in benediction over the vanishing city where she had
drawn her breath. He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only
a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for
him. But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew
that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever. It was
nine o'clock when we finished breakfast and went out on the porch. The night
had made a sharp difference in the weather and there was an autumn flavor in
the air. The gardener, the last one of Gatsby's former servants, came to the
foot of the steps. "I'm going to drain the pool to-day, Mr. Gatsby.
Leaves'll start falling pretty soon, and then there's always trouble with
the pipes." "Don't do it to-day," Gatsby answered. He turned to me
apologetically. "You know, old sport, I've never used that pool all summer?"
I looked at my watch and stood up. "Twelve minutes to my train." I didn't
want to go to the city. I wasn't worth a decent stroke of work, but it was
more than that--I didn't want to leave Gatsby. I missed that train, and then
another, before I could get myself away. "I'll call you up," I said finally.
"Do, old sport." "I'll call you about noon." We walked slowly down the
steps. "I suppose Daisy'll call too." He looked at me anxiously, as if he
hoped I'd corroborate this. "I suppose so." "Well, good-by." We shook hands
and I started away. Just before I reached the hedge I remembered something
and turned around. "They're a rotten crowd," I shouted across the lawn.
"You're worth the whole damn bunch put together." I've always been glad I
said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved
of him from beginning to end. First he nodded politely, and then his face
broke into that radiant and understanding smile, as if we'd been in ecstatic
cahoots on that fact all the time. His gorgeous pink rag of a suit made a
bright spot of color against the white steps, and I thought of the night
when I first came to his ancestral home, three months before. The lawn and
drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his
corruption--and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible
dream, as he waved them good-by. I thanked him for his hospitality. We were
always thanking him for that--I and the others. "Good-by," I called. "I
enjoyed breakfast, Gatsby." Up in the city, I tried for a while to list the
quotations on an interminable amount of stock, then I fell asleep in my
swivel-chair. Just before noon the phone woke me, and I started up with
sweat breaking out on my forehead. It was Jordan Baker; she often called me
up at this hour because the uncertainty of her own movements between hotels
and clubs and private houses made her hard to find in any other way. Usually
her voice came over the wire as something fresh and cool, as if a divot from
a green golf-links had come sailing in at the office window, but this
morning it seemed harsh and dry. "I've left Daisy's house," she said. "I'm
at Hempstead, and I'm going down to Southampton this afternoon." Probably it
had been tactful to leave Daisy's house, but the act annoyed me, and her
next remark made me rigid. "You weren't so nice to me last night." "How
could it have mattered then?" Silence for a moment. Then: "However--I want
to see you." "I want to see you, too." "Suppose I don't go to Southampton,
and come into town this afternoon?" "No--I don't think this afternoon."
"Very well." "It's impossible this afternoon. Various----" We talked like
that for a while, and then abruptly we weren't talking any longer. I don't
know which of us hung up with a sharp click, but I know I didn't care. I
couldn't have talked to her across a tea-table that day if I never talked to
her again in this world. I called Gatsby's house a few minutes later, but
the line was busy. I tried four times; finally an exasperated central told
me the wire was being kept open for long distance from Detroit. Taking out
my time-table, I drew a small circle around the three-fifty train. Then I
leaned back in my chair and tried to think. It was just noon. When I passed
the ashheaps on the train that morning I had crossed deliberately to the
other side of the car. I suppose there'd be a curious crowd around there all
day with little boys searching for dark spots in the dust, and some
garrulous man telling over and over what had happened, until it became less
and less real even to him and he could tell it no longer, and Myrtle
Wilson's tragic achievement was forgotten. Now I want to go back a little
and tell what happened at the garage after we left there the night before.
They had difficulty in locating the sister, Catherine. She must have broken
her rule against drinking that night, for when she arrived she was stupid
with liquor and unable to understand that the ambulance had already gone to
Flushing. When they convinced her of this, she immediately fainted, as if
that was the intolerable part of the affair. Some one, kind or curious, took
her in his car and drove her in the wake of her sister's body. Until long
after midnight a changing crowd lapped up against the front of the garage,
while George Wilson rocked himself back and forth on the couch inside. For a
while the door of the office was open, and every one who came into the
garage glanced irresistibly through it. Finally someone said it was a shame,
and closed the door. Michaelis and several other men were with him; first,
four or five men, later two or three men. Still later Michaelis had to ask
the last stranger to wait there fifteen minutes longer, while he went back
to his own place and made a pot of coffee. After that, he stayed there alone
with Wilson until dawn. About three o'clock the quality of Wilson's
incoherent muttering changed--he grew quieter and began to talk about the
yellow car. He announced that he had a way of finding out whom the yellow
car belonged to, and then he blurted out that a couple of months ago his
wife had come from the city with her face bruised and her nose swollen. But
when he heard himself say this, he flinched and began to cry "Oh, my God!"
again in his groaning voice. Michaelis made a clumsy attempt to distract
him. "How long have you been married, George? Come on there, try and sit
still a minute and answer my question. How long have you been married?"
"Twelve years." "Ever had any children? Come on, George, sit still--I asked
you a question. Did you ever have any children?" The hard brown beetles kept
thudding against the dull light, and whenever Michaelis heard a car go
tearing along the road outside it sounded to him like the car that hadn't
stopped a few hours before. He didn't like to go into the garage, because
the work bench was stained where the body had been lying, so he moved
uncomfortably around the office--he knew every object in it before
morning--and from time to time sat down beside Wilson trying to keep him
more quiet. "Have you got a church you go to sometimes, George? Maybe even
if you haven't been there for a long time? Maybe I could call up the church
and get a priest to come over and he could talk to you, see?" "Don't belong
to any." "You ought to have a church, George, for times like this. You must
have gone to church once. Didn't you get married in a church? Listen,
George, listen to me. Didn't you get married in a church?" "That was a long
time ago." The effort of answering broke the rhythm of his rocking--for a
moment he was silent. Then the same half-knowing, half-bewildered look came
back into his faded eyes. "Look in the drawer there," he said, pointing at
the desk. "Which drawer?" "That drawer--that one." Michaelis opened the
drawer nearest his hand. There was nothing in it but a small, expensive
dog-leash, made of leather and braided silver. It was apparently new.
"This?" he inquired, holding it up. Wilson stared and nodded. "I found it
yesterday afternoon. She tried to tell me about it, but I knew it was
something funny." "You mean your wife bought it?" "She had it wrapped in
tissue paper on her bureau." Michaelis didn't see anything odd in that, and
he gave Wilson a dozen reasons why his wife might have bought the dog-leash.
But conceivably Wilson had heard some of these same explanations before,
from Myrtle, because he began saying "Oh, my God!" again in a whisper--his
comforter left several explanations in the air. "Then he killed her," said
Wilson. His mouth dropped open suddenly. "Who did?" "I have a way of finding
out." "You're morbid, George," said his friend. "This has been a strain to
you and you don't know what you're saying. You'd better try and sit quiet
till morning." "He murdered her." "It was an accident, George." Wilson shook
his head. His eyes narrowed and his mouth widened slightly with the ghost of
a superior "Hm!" "I know," he said definitely, "I'm one of these trusting
fellas and I don't think any harm to nobody, but when I get to know a thing
I know it. It was the man in that car. She ran out to speak to him and he
wouldn't stop." Michaelis had seen this too, but it hadn't occurred to him
that there was any special significance in it. He believed that Mrs. Wilson
had been running away from her husband, rather than trying to stop any
particular car. "How could she of been like that?" "She's a deep one," said
Wilson, as if that answered the question. "Ah-h-h----" He began to rock
again, and Michaelis stood twisting the leash in his hand. "Maybe you got
some friend that I could telephone for, George?" This was a forlorn hope--he
was almost sure that Wilson had no friend: there was not enough of him for
his wife. He was glad a little later when he noticed a change in the room, a
blue quickening by the window, and realized that dawn wasn't far off. About
five o'clock it was blue enough outside to snap off the light. Wilson's
glazed eyes turned out to the ashheaps, where small gray clouds took on
fantastic shape and scurried here and there in the faint dawn wind. "I spoke
to her," he muttered, after a long silence. "I told her she might fool me
but she couldn't fool God. I took her to the window."--with an effort he got
up and walked to the rear window and leaned with his face pressed against
it----" and I said 'God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been
doing. You may fool me, but you can't fool God!'" Standing behind him,
Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J.
Eckleburg, which had just emerged, pale and enormous, from the dissolving
night. "God sees everything," repeated Wilson. "That's an advertisement,"
Michaelis assured him. Something made him turn away from the window and look
back into the room. But Wilson stood there a long time, his face close to
the window pane, nodding into the twilight. By six o'clock Michaelis was
worn out, and grateful for the sound of a car stopping outside. It was one
of the watchers of the night before who had promised to come back, so he
cooked breakfast for three, which he and the other man ate together. Wilson
was quieter now, and Michaelis went home to sleep; when he awoke four hours
later and hurried back to the garage, Wilson was gone. His movements--he was
on foot all the time--were afterward traced to Port Roosevelt and then to
Gad's Hill, where he bought a sandwich that he didn't eat, and a cup of
coffee. He must have been tired and walking slowly, for he didn't reach
Gad's Hill until noon. Thus far there was no difficulty in accounting for
his time--there were boys who had seen a man "acting sort of crazy," and
motorists at whom he stared oddly from the side of the road. Then for three
hours he disappeared from view. The police, on the strength of what he said
to Michaelis, that he "had a way of finding out," supposed that he spent
that time going from garage to garage thereabout, inquiring for a yellow
car. On the other hand, no garage man who had seen him ever came forward,
and perhaps he had an easier, surer way of finding out what he wanted to
know. By half-past two he was in West Egg, where he asked someone the way to
Gatsby's house. So by that time he knew Gatsby's name. At two o'clock Gatsby
put on his bathing-suit and left word with the butler that if any one phoned
word was to be brought to him at the pool. He stopped at the garage for a
pneumatic mattress that had amused his guests during the summer, and the
chauffeur helped him pump it up. Then he gave instructions that the open car
wasn't to be taken out under any circumstances--and this was strange,
because the front right fender needed repair. Gatsby shouldered the mattress
and started for the pool. Once he stopped and shifted it a little, and the
chauffeur asked him if he needed help, but he shook his head and in a moment
disappeared among the yellowing trees. No telephone message arrived, but the
butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o'clock--until
long after there was any one to give it to if it came. I have an idea that
Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared.
If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid
a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up
at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found
what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the
scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor
ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like
that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.
The chauffeur--he was one of Wolfshiem's proteges--heard the
shots--afterward he could only say that he hadn't thought anything much
about them. I drove from the station directly to Gatsby's house and my
rushing anxiously up the front steps was the first thing that alarmed any
one. But they knew then, I firmly believe. With scarcely a word said, four
of us, the chauffeur, butler, gardener, and I, hurried down to the pool.
There was a faint, barely perceptible movement of the water as the fresh
flow from one end urged its way toward the drain at the other. with little
ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves, the laden mattress moved
irregularly down the pool. A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the
surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental
burden. The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like
the leg of compass, a thin red circle in the water. It was after we started
with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson's body a little
way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete. Chapter 9 After two
years I remember the rest of that day, and that night and the next day, only
as an endless drill of police and photographers and newspaper men in and out
of Gatsby's front door. A rope stretched across the main gate and a
policeman by it kept out the curious, but little boys soon discovered that
they could enter through my yard, and there were always a few of them
clustered open-mouthed about the pool. Someone with a positive manner,
perhaps a detective, used the expression "madman." as he bent over Wilson's
body that afternoon, and the adventitious authority of his voice set the key
for the newspaper reports next morning. Most of those reports were a
nightmare--grotesque, circumstantial, eager, and untrue. When Michaelis's
testimony at the inquest brought to light Wilson's suspicions of his wife I
thought the whole tale would shortly be served up in racy pasquinade--but
Catherine, who might have said anything, didn't say a word. She showed a
surprising amount of character about it too--looked at the coroner with
determined eyes under that corrected brow of hers, and swore that her sister
had never seen Gatsby, that her sister was completely happy with her
husband, that her sister had been into no mischief whatever. She convinced
herself of it, and cried into her handkerchief, as if the very suggestion
was more than she could endure. So Wilson was reduced to a man "deranged by
grief." in order that the case might remain in its simplist form. And it
rested there. But all this part of it seemed remote and unessential. I found
myself on Gatsby's side, and alone. From the moment I telephoned news of the
catastrophe to West Egg village, every surmise about him, and every
practical question, was referred to me. At first I was surprised and
confused; then, as he lay in his house and didn't move or breathe or speak,
hour upon hour, it grew upon me that I was responsible, because no one else
was interested--interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to
which every one has some vague right at the end. I called up Daisy half an
hour after we found him, called her instinctively and without hesitation.
But she and Tom had gone away early that afternoon, and taken baggage with
them. "Left no address?" "No." "Say when they'd be back?" "No." "Any idea
where they are? How I could reach them?" "I don't know. Can't say." I wanted
to get somebody for him. I wanted to go into the room where he lay and
reassure him: "I'll get somebody for you, Gatsby. Don't worry. Just trust me
and I'll get somebody for you----" Meyer Wolfshiem's name wasn't in the
phone book. The butler gave me his office address on Broadway, and I called
Information, but by the time I had the number it was long after five, and no
one answered the phone. "Will you ring again?" "I've rung them three times."
"It's very important." "Sorry. I'm afraid no one's there." I went back to
the drawing-room and thought for an instant that they were chance visitors,
all these official people who suddenly filled it. But, as they drew back the
sheet and looked at Gatsby with unmoved eyes, his protest continued in my
brain: "Look here, old sport, you've got to get somebody for me. You've got
to try hard. I can't go through this alone." Some one started to ask me
questions, but I broke away and going up-stairs looked hastily through the
unlocked parts of his desk--he'd never told me definitely that his parents
were dead. But there was nothing--only the picture of Dan Cody, a token of
forgotten violence, staring down from the wall. Next morning I sent the
butler to New York with a letter to Wolfshiem, which asked for information
and urged him to come out on the next train. That request seemed superfluous
when I wrote it. I was sure he'd start when he saw the newspapers, just as I
was sure there'd be a wire from Daisy before noon--but neither a wire nor
Mr. Wolfshiem arrived; no one arrived except more police and photographers
and newspaper men. When the butler brought back Wolfshiem's answer I began
to have a feeling of defiance, of scornful solidarity between Gatsby and me
against them all. DEAR MR. CARRAWAY. This has been one of the most terrible
shocks of my life to me I hardly can believe it that it is true at all. Such
a mad act as that man did should make us all think. I cannot come down now
as I am tied up in some very important business and cannot get mixed up in
this thing now. If there is anything I can do a little later let me know in
a letter by Edgar. I hardly know where I am when I hear about a thing like
this and am completely knocked down and out. Yours truly MEYER WOLFSHIEM and
then hasty addenda beneath: Let me know about the funeral etc. do not know
his family at all. When the phone rang that afternoon and Long Distance said
Chicago was calling I thought this would be Daisy at last. But the
connection came through as a man's voice, very thin and far away. "This is
Slagle speaking . . ." "Yes?" The name was unfamiliar. "Hell of a note,
isn't it? Get my wire?" "There haven't been any wires." "Young Parke's in
trouble," he said rapidly. "They picked him up when he handed the bonds over
the counter. They got a circular from New York giving 'em the numbers just
five minutes before. What d'you know about that, hey? You never can tell in
these hick towns----" "Hello!" I interrupted breathlessly. "Look here--this
isn't Mr. Gatsby. Mr. Gatsby's dead." There was a long silence on the other
end of the wire, followed by an exclamation . . . then a quick squawk as the
connection was broken. I think it was on the third day that a telegram
signed Henry C. Gatz arrived from a town in Minnesota. It said only that the
sender was leaving immediately and to postpone the funeral until he came. It
was Gatsby's father, a solemn old man, very helpless and dismayed, bundled
up in a long cheap ulster against the warm September day. His eyes leaked
continuously with excitement, and when I took the bag and umbrella from his
hands he began to pull so incessantly at his sparse gray beard that I had
difficulty in getting off his coat. He was on the point of collapse, so I
took him into the music room and made him sit down while I sent for
something to eat. But he wouldn't eat, and the glass of milk spilled from
his trembling hand. "I saw it in the Chicago newspaper," he said. "It was
all in the Chicago newspaper. I started right away." "I didn't know how to
reach you." His eyes, seeing nothing, moved ceaselessly about the room. "It
was a madman," he said. "He must have been mad." "Wouldn't you like some
coffee?" I urged him. "I don't want anything. I'm all right now, Mr.----"
"Carraway." "Well, I'm all right now. Where have they got Jimmy?" I took him
into the drawing-room, where his son lay, and left him there. Some little
boys had come up on the steps and were looking into the hall; when I told
them who had arrived, they went reluctantly away. After a little while Mr.
Gatz opened the door and came out, his mouth ajar, his face flushed
slightly, his eyes leaking isolated and unpunctual tears. He had reached an
age where death no longer has the quality of ghastly surprise, and when he
looked around him now for the first time and saw the height and splendor of
the hall and the great rooms opening out from it into other rooms, his grief
began to be mixed with an awed pride. I helped him to a bedroom up-stairs;
while he took off his coat and vest I told him that all arrangements had
been deferred until he came. "I didn't know what you'd want, Mr. Gatsby----"
"Gatz is my name." "--Mr. Gatz. I thought you might want to take the body
West." He shook his head. "Jimmy always liked it better down East. He rose
up to his position in the East. Were you a friend of my boy's, Mr.--?" "We
were close friends." "He had a big future before him, you know. He was only
a young man, but he had a lot of brain power here." He touched his head
impressively, and I nodded. "If he'd of lived, he'd of been a great man. A
man like James J. Hill. He'd of helped build up the country." "That's true,"
I said, uncomfortably. He fumbled at the embroidered coverlet, trying to
take it from the bed, and lay down stiffly--was instantly asleep. That night
an obviously frightened person called up, and demanded to know who I was
before he would give his name. "This is Mr. Carraway," I said. "Oh!" He
sounded relieved. "This is Klipspringer." I was relieved too, for that
seemed to promise another friend at Gatsby's grave. I didn't want it to be
in the papers and draw a sightseeing crowd, so I'd been calling up a few
people myself. They were hard to find. "The funeral's to-morrow," I said.
"Three o'clock, here at the house. I wish you'd tell anybody who'd be
interested." "Oh, I will," he broke out hastily. "Of course I'm not likely
to see anybody, but if I do." His tone made me suspicious. "Of course you'll
be there yourself." "Well, I'll certainly try. What I called up about
is----" "Wait a minute," I interrupted. "How about saying you'll come?"
"Well, the fact is--the truth of the matter is that I'm staying with some
people up here in Greenwich, and they rather expect me to be with them
to-morrow. In fact, there's a sort of picnic or something. Of course I'll do
my very best to get away." I ejaculated an unrestrained "Huh!" and he must
have heard me, for he went on nervously: "What I called up about was a pair
of shoes I left there. Iwonder if it'd be too much trouble to have the
butler send them on. You see, they're tennis shoes, and I'm sort of helpless
without them. My address is care of B. F.----" I didn't hear the rest of the
name, because I hung up the receiver. After that I felt a certain shame for
Gatsby--one gentleman to whom I telephoned implied that he had got what he
deserved. However, that was my fault, for he was one of those who used to
sneer most bitterly at Gatsby on the courage of Gatsby's liquor, and I
should have known better than to call him. The morning of the funeral I went
up to New York to see Meyer Wolfshiem; I couldn't seem to reach him any
other way. The door that I pushed open, on the advice of an elevator boy,
was marked "The Swastika Holding Company," and at first there didn't seem to
be any one inside. But when I'd shouted "hello." several times in vain, an
argument broke out behind a partition, and presently a lovely Jewess
appeared at an interior door and scrutinized me with black hostile eyes.
"Nobody's in," she said. "Mr. Wolfshiem's gone to Chicago." The first part
of this was obviously untrue, for someone had begun to whistle "The Rosary,"
tunelessly, inside. "Please say that Mr. Carraway wants to see him." "I
can't get him back from Chicago, can I?" At this moment a voice,
unmistakably Wolfshiem's, called "Stella!" from the other side of the door.
"Leave your name on the desk," she said quickly. "I'll give it to him when
he gets back." "But I know he's there." She took a step toward me and began
to slide her hands indignantly up and down her hips. "You young men think
you can force your way in here any time," she scolded. "We're getting
sickantired of it. When I say he's in Chicago, he's in Chicago." I mentioned
Gatsby. "Oh--h!" She looked at me over again. "Will you just--What was your
name?" She vanished. In a moment Meyer Wolfshiem stood solemnly in the
doorway, holding out both hands. He drew me into his office, remarking in a
reverent voice that it was a sad time for all of us, and offered me a cigar.
"My memory goes back to when I first met him," he said. "A young major just
out of the army and covered over with medals he got in the war. He was so
hard up he had to keep on wearing his uniform because he couldn't buy some
regular clothes. First time I saw him was when he come into Winebrenner's
poolroom at Forty-third Street and asked for a job. He hadn't eat anything
for a couple of days. 'come on have some lunch with me,' I sid. He ate more
than four dollars' worth of food in half an hour." "Did you start him in
business?" I inquired. "Start him! I made him." "Oh." "I raised him up out
of nothing, right out of the gutter. I saw right away he was a
fine-appearing, gentlemanly young man, and when he told me he was an
Oggsford I knew I could use him good. I got him to join up in the American
Legion and he used to stand high there. Right off he did some work for a
client of mine up to Albany. We were so thick like that in everything."--he
held up two bulbous fingers----" always together." I wondered if this
partnership had included the World's Series transaction in 1919. "Now he's
dead," I said after a moment. "You were his closest friend, so I know you'll
want to come to his funeral this afternoon." "I'd like to come." "Well, come
then." The hair in his nostrils quivered slightly, and as he shook his head
his eyes filled with tears. "I can't do it--I can't get mixed up in it," he
said. "There's nothing to get mixed up in. It's all over now." "When a man
gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it in any way. I keep out. When
I was a young man it was different--if a friend of mine died, no matter how,
I stuck with them to the end. You may think that's sentimental, but I mean
it--to the bitter end." I saw that for some reason of his own he was
determined not to come, so I stood up. "Are you a college man?" he inquired
suddenly. For a moment I thought he was going to suggest a "gonnegtion," but
he only nodded and shook my hand. "Let us learn to show our friendship for a
man when he is alive and not after he is dead," he suggested. "After that my
own rule is to let everything alone." When I left his office the sky had
turned dark and I got back to West Egg in a drizzle. After changing my
clothes I went next door and found Mr. Gatz walking up and down excitedly in
the hall. His pride in his son and in his son's possessions was continually
increasing and now he had something to show me. "Jimmy sent me this
picture." He took out his wallet with trembling fingers. "Look there." It
was a photograph of the house, cracked in the corners and dirty with many
hands. He pointed out every detail to me eagerly. "Look there!" and then
sought admiration from my eyes. He had shown it so often that I think it was
more real to him now than the house itself. "Jimmy sent it to me. I think
it's a very pretty picture. It shows up well." "Very well. Had you seen him
lately?" "He come out to see me two years ago and bought me the house I live
in now. Of course we was broke up when he run off from home, but I see now
there was a reason for it. He knew he had a big future in front of him. And
ever since he made a success he was very generous with me." He seemed
reluctant to put away the picture, held it for another minute, lingeringly,
before my eyes. Then he returned the wallet and pulled from his pocket a
ragged old copy of a book called HOPALONG CASSIDY. "Look here, this is a
book he had when he was a boy. It just shows you." He opened it at the back
cover and turned it around for me to see. On the last fly-leaf was printed
the word SCHEDULE, and the date September 12, 1906. and underneath: Rise
from bed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.00 A.M. Dumbbell exercise and
wall-scaling . . . . . . 6.15-6.30 " Study electricity, etc . . . . . . . .
. . . . 7.15-8.15 " Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.30-4.30
P.M. Baseball and sports . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.30-5.00 " Practice
elocution, poise and how to attain it 5.00-6.00 " Study needed inventions .
. . . . . . . . . . 7.00-9.00 " GENERAL RESOLVES No wasting time at Shafters
or [a name, indecipherable] No more smokeing or chewing Bath every other day
Read one improving book or magazine per week Save $5.00 {crossed out} $3.00
per week Be better to parents "I come across this book by accident," said
the old man. "It just shows you, don't it?" "It just shows you." "Jimmy was
bound to get ahead. He always had some resolves like this or something. Do
you notice what he's got about improving his mind? He was always great for
that. He told me I et like a hog once, and I beat him for it." He was
reluctant to close the book, reading each item aloud and then looking
eagerly at me. I think he rather expected me to copy down the list for my
own use. A little before three the Lutheran minister arrived from Flushing,
and I began to look involuntarily out the windows for other cars. So did
Gatsby's father. And as the time passed and the servants came in and stood
waiting in the hall, his eyes began to blink anxiously, and he spoke of the
rain in a worried, uncertain way. The minister glanced several times at his
watch, so I took him aside and asked him to wait for half an hour. But it
wasn't any use. Nobody came. About five o'clock our procession of three cars
reached the cemetery and stopped in a thick drizzle beside the gate--first a
motor hearse, horribly black and wet, then Mr. Gatz and the minister and I
in the limousine, and a little later four or five servants and the postman
from West Egg in Gatsby's station wagon, all wet to the skin. As we started
through the gate into the cemetery I heard a car stop and then the sound of
someone splashing after us over the soggy ground. I looked around. It was
the man with owl-eyed glasses whom I had found marvelling over Gatsby's
books in the library one night three months before. I'd never seen him since
then. I don't know how he knew about the funeral, or even his name. The rain
poured down his thick glasses, and he took them off and wiped them to see
the protecting canvas unrolled from Gatsby's grave. I tried to think about
Gatsby then for a moment, but he was already too far away, and I could only
remember, without resentment, that Daisy hadn't sent a message or a flower.
Dimly I heard someone murmur, "Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on,"
and then the owl-eyed man said "Amen to that," in a brave voice. We
straggled down quickly through the rain to the cars. Owl-eyes spoke to me by
the gate. "I couldn't get to the house," he remarked. "Neither could anybody
else." "Go on!" He started. "Why, my God! they used to go there by the
hundreds." He took off his glasses and wiped them again, outside and in.
"The poor son-of-a-bitch," he said. One of my most vivid memories is of
coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time.
Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union
Station at six o'clock of a December evening, with a few Chicago friends,
already caught up into their own holiday gayeties, to bid them a hasty
good-by. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss
This-or-that's and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving
overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of
invitations: "Are you going to the Ordways'? the Herseys'? the Schultzes'?"
and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the
murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad looking
cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate. When we pulled
out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out
beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small
Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air.
We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold
vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one
strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again. That's my
Middle West--not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the
thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh
bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted
windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of
those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway
house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a
family's name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after
all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and
perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly
unadaptable to Eastern life. Even when the East excited me most, even when I
was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen
towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared
only the children and the very old--even then it had always for me a quality
of distortion. West Egg, especially, still figures in my more fantastic
dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once
conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a
lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are
walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in
a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold
with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house--the wrong house. But no one
knows the woman's name, and no one cares. After Gatsby's death the East was
haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes' power of correction. So
when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the
wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home. There was one
thing to be done before I left, an awkward, unpleasant thing that perhaps
had better have been let alone. But I wanted to leave things in order and
not just trust that obliging and indifferent sea to sweep my refuse away. I
saw Jordan Baker and talked over and around what had happened to us
together, and what had happened afterward to me, and she lay perfectly
still, listening, in a big chair. She was dressed to play golf, and I
remember thinking she looked like a good illustration, her chin raised a
little jauntily, her hair the color of an autumn leaf, her face the same
brown tint as the fingerless glove on her knee. When I had finished she told
me without comment that she was engaged to another man. I doubted that,
though there were several she could have married at a nod of her head, but I
pretended to be surprised. For just a minute I wondered if I wasn't making a
mistake, then I thought it all over again quickly and got up to say
good-bye. "Nevertheless you did throw me over," said Jordan suddenly. "You
threw me over on the telephone. I don't give a damn about you now, but it
was a new experience for me, and I felt a little dizzy for a while." We
shook hands. "Oh, and do you remember."--she added----" a conversation we
had once about driving a car?" "Why--not exactly." "You said a bad driver
was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad
driver, didn't I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I
thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was
your secret pride." "I'm thirty," I said. "I'm five years too old to lie to
myself and call it honor." She didn't answer. Angry, and half in love with
her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away. One afternoon late in October I
saw Tom Buchanan. He was walking ahead of me along Fifth Avenue in his
alert, aggressive way, his hands out a little from his body as if to fight
off interference, his head moving sharply here and there, adapting itself to
his restless eyes. Just as I slowed up to avoid overtaking him he stopped
and began frowning into the windows of a jewelry store. Suddenly he saw me
and walked back, holding out his hand. "What's the matter, Nick? Do you
object to shaking hands with me?" "Yes. You know what I think of you."
"You're crazy, Nick," he said quickly. "Crazy as hell. I don't know what's
the matter with you." "Tom," I inquired, "what did you say to Wilson that
afternoon?" He stared at me without a word, and I knew I had guessed right
about those missing hours. I started to turn away, but he took a step after
me and grabbed my arm. "I told him the truth," he said. "He came to the door
while we were getting ready to leave, and when I sent down word that we
weren't in he tried to force his way up-stairs. He was crazy enough to kill
me if I hadn't told him who owned the car. His hand was on a revolver in his
pocket every minute he was in the house----" He broke off defiantly. "What
if I did tell him? That fellow had it coming to him. He threw dust into your
eyes just like he did in Daisy's, but he was a tough one. He ran over Myrtle
like you'd run over a dog and never even stopped his car." There was nothing
I could say, except the one unutterable fact that it wasn't true. "And if
you think I didn't have my share of suffering--look here, when I went to
give up that flat and saw that damn box of dog biscuits sitting there on the
sideboard, I sat down and cried like a baby. By God it was awful----" I
couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to
him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were
careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and
then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever
it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they
had made. . . . I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt
suddenly as though I were talking to a child. Then he went into the jewelry
store to buy a pearl necklace--or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons--rid
of my provincial squeamishness forever. Gatsby's house was still empty when
I left--the grass on his lawn had grown as long as mine. One of the taxi
drivers in the village never took a fare past the entrance gate without
stopping for a minute and pointing inside; perhaps it was he who drove Daisy
and Gatsby over to East Egg the night of the accident, and perhaps he had
made a story about it all his own. I didn't want to hear it and I avoided
him when I got off the train. I spent my Saturday nights in New York because
those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could
still hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant, from his garden,
and the cars going up and down his drive. One night I did hear a material
car there, and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I didn't
investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends
of the earth and didn't know that the party was over. On the last night,
with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked
at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an
obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly
in the moonlight, and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the
stone. Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand. Most
of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights
except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the
moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I
became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors'
eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees
that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the
last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man
must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into
an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face
for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for
wonder. And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of
Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of
Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must
have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know
that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond
the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year
recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--to-morrow we
will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine
morning---- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly
into the past.
Last-modified: Sat, 01 Feb 2003 07:33:38 GMT