tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-50339840403611375412023-11-02T03:36:51.554-07:00The Great GatsbyF. Scott FitzgeraldAdminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13783659974416042562noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5033984040361137541.post-47809563885582367842999-02-08T07:14:00.000-08:002007-02-08T07:25:31.050-08:00Title: The Great Gatsby<br />Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald<br />* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *<br />eBook No.: 0200041.txt<br />Language: English<br />Date first posted: January 2002<br />Date most recently updated: May 2006<br /><br />This eBook was produced by: Colin Choat<br /><br />Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions<br />which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice<br />is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular<br />paper edition.<br /><br />Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the<br />copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this<br />file.<br /><br />This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions<br />whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms<br />of the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online at<br />http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html<br /><br />To contact Project Gutenberg of Australia go to http://gutenberg.net.au<br /><br /><br />Title: The Great Gatsby<br />Author: F. Scott FitzgeraldAdminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13783659974416042562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5033984040361137541.post-69356699622499135702999-02-06T06:43:00.000-08:002007-02-06T08:13:12.839-08:00Chapter 1<pre style="font-family:verdana;"><span style="font-size:100%;">In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice<br />that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.<br /><br />"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just<br />remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages<br />that you've had."<br /><br />He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative<br />in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more<br />than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments,<br />a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also<br />made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind<br />is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it<br />appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I<br />was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the<br />secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were<br />unsought--frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile<br />levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate<br />revelation was quivering on the horizon--for the intimate revelations<br />of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are<br />usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving<br />judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of<br />missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested,<br />and I snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is<br />parcelled out unequally at birth.<br /><br />And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission<br />that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet<br />marshes but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on.<br />When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the<br />world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I<br />wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the<br />human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was<br />exempt from my reaction--Gatsby who represented everything for which I<br />have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of<br />successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some<br />heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related<br />to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten<br />thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that<br />flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the<br />"creative temperament"--it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic<br />readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it<br />is not likely I shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right<br />at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the<br />wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the<br />abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.<br /><br /><br />My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western<br />city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan and we<br />have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the<br />actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother who came here in<br />fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale<br />hardware business that my father carries on today.<br /><br />I never saw this great-uncle but I'm supposed to look like him--with<br />special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in<br />Father's office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a<br />century after my father, and a little later I participated in that<br />delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the<br />counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being<br />the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the<br />ragged edge of the universe--so I decided to go east and learn the bond<br />business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it<br />could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it<br />over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said,<br />"Why--ye-es" with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance<br />me for a year and after various delays I came east, permanently, I<br />thought, in the spring of twenty-two.<br /><br />The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm<br />season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees,<br />so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house<br />together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea. He found<br />the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but<br />at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went out<br />to the country alone. I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days<br />until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed<br />and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the<br />electric stove.<br /><br />It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently<br />arrived than I, stopped me on the road.<br /><br />"How do you get to West Egg village?" he asked helplessly.<br /><br />I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a<br />pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the<br />freedom of the neighborhood.<br /><br />And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the<br />trees--just as things grow in fast movies--I had that familiar<br />conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.<br /><br />There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be<br />pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen<br />volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood<br />on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to<br />unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas<br />knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides.<br />I was rather literary in college--one year I wrote a series of very<br />solemn and obvious editorials for the "Yale News"--and now I was going<br />to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most<br />limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man." This isn't just an<br />epigram--life is much more successfully looked at from a single window,<br />after all.<br /><br />It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of<br />the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender<br />riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where<br />there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of<br />land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in<br />contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most<br />domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great<br />wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals--like the<br />egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact<br />end--but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual<br />confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more<br />arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except<br />shape and size.<br /><br />I lived at West Egg, the--well, the less fashionable of the two, though<br />this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little<br />sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the<br />egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge<br />places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on<br />my right was a colossal affair by any standard--it was a factual<br />imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side,<br />spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool<br />and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby's mansion.<br />Or rather, as I didn't know Mr. Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by<br />a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a<br />small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the<br />water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the consoling<br />proximity of millionaires--all for eighty dollars a month.<br /><br />Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg<br />glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins<br />on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom<br />Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I'd known Tom<br />in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in<br />Chicago.<br /><br />Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of<br />the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven--a<br />national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute<br />limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of<br />anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy--even in college his<br />freedom with money was a matter for reproach--but now he'd left Chicago<br />and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for<br />instance he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest.<br />It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy<br />enough to do that.<br /><br />Why they came east I don't know. They had spent a year in France, for no<br />particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever<br />people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move,<br />said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn't believe it--I had no sight<br />into Daisy's heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking<br />a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable<br />football game.<br /><br />And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East<br />Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was<br />even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian<br />Colonial mansion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach<br />and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over<br />sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens--finally when it reached<br />the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the<br />momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows,<br />glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy<br />afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his<br />legs apart on the front porch.<br /><br />He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy, straw haired<br />man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner.<br />Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and<br />gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not<br />even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous<br />power of that body--he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he<br />strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle<br />shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body<br />capable of enormous leverage--a cruel body.<br /><br />His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of<br />fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in<br />it, even toward people he liked--and there were men at New Haven who had<br />hated his guts.<br /><br />"Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final," he seemed to<br />say, "just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are." We<br />were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I<br />always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like<br />him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.<br /><br />We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.<br /><br />"I've got a nice place here," he said, his eyes flashing about<br />restlessly.<br /><br />Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the<br />front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half<br />acre of deep pungent roses and a snub-nosed motor boat that bumped<br />the tide off shore.<br /><br />"It belonged to Demaine the oil man." He turned me around again,<br />politely and abruptly. "We'll go inside."<br /><br />We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space,<br />fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end.<br />The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass<br />outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze<br />blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other<br />like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of<br />the ceiling--and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a<br />shadow on it as wind does on the sea.<br /><br />The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch<br />on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored<br />balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and<br />fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight<br />around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the<br />whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall.<br />Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught<br />wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two<br />young women ballooned slowly to the floor.<br /><br />The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length<br />at her end of the divan, completely motionless and with her chin raised<br />a little as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely<br />to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of<br />it--indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having<br />disturbed her by coming in.<br /><br />The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise--she leaned slightly<br />forward with a conscientious expression--then she laughed, an absurd,<br />charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the<br />room.<br /><br />"I'm p-paralyzed with happiness."<br /><br />She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand<br />for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one<br />in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had.<br />She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker.<br />(I've heard it said that Daisy's murmur was only to make people<br />lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)<br /><br />At any rate Miss Baker's lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost<br />imperceptibly and then quickly tipped her head back again--the object<br />she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something<br />of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any<br />exhibition of complete self sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.<br /><br />I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low,<br />thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and<br />down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be<br />played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it,<br />bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth--but there was an excitement<br />in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget:<br />a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done<br />gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay,<br />exciting things hovering in the next hour.<br /><br />I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way east<br />and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.<br /><br />"Do they miss me?" she cried ecstatically.<br /><br />"The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel<br />painted black as a mourning wreath and there's a persistent wail all<br />night along the North Shore."<br /><br />"How gorgeous! Let's go back, Tom. Tomorrow!" Then she added<br />irrelevantly, "You ought to see the baby."<br /><br />"I'd like to."<br /><br />"She's asleep. She's two years old. Haven't you ever seen her?"<br /><br />"Never."<br /><br />"Well, you ought to see her. She's----"<br /><br />Tom Buchanan who had been hovering restlessly about the room stopped<br />and rested his hand on my shoulder.<br /><br />"What you doing, Nick?"<br /><br />"I'm a bond man."<br /><br />"Who with?"<br /><br />I told him.<br /><br />"Never heard of them," he remarked decisively.<br /><br />This annoyed me.<br /><br />"You will," I answered shortly. "You will if you stay in the East."<br /><br />"Oh, I'll stay in the East, don't you worry," he said, glancing at<br />Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more.<br />"I'd be a God Damned fool to live anywhere else."<br /><br />At this point Miss Baker said "Absolutely!" with such suddenness that I<br />started--it was the first word she uttered since I came into the room.<br />Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and<br />with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.<br /><br />"I'm stiff," she complained, "I've been lying on that sofa for as long<br />as I can remember."<br /><br />"Don't look at me," Daisy retorted. "I've been trying to get you to New<br />York all afternoon."<br /><br />"No, thanks," said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the<br />pantry, "I'm absolutely in training."<br /><br />Her host looked at her incredulously.<br /><br />"You are!" He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of<br />a glass. "How you ever get anything done is beyond me."<br /><br />I looked at Miss Baker wondering what it was she "got done." I enjoyed<br />looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect<br />carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the<br />shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at<br />me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented<br />face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her,<br />somewhere before.<br /><br />"You live in West Egg," she remarked contemptuously. "I know somebody<br />there."<br /><br />"I don't know a single----"<br /><br />"You must know Gatsby."<br /><br />"Gatsby?" demanded Daisy. "What Gatsby?"<br /><br />Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced;<br />wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine Tom Buchanan compelled<br />me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.<br /><br />Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips the two<br />young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch open toward the<br />sunset where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished<br />wind.<br /><br />"Why CANDLES?" objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her<br />fingers. "In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year."<br />She looked at us all radiantly. "Do you always watch for the longest day<br />of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the<br />year and then miss it."<br /><br />"We ought to plan something," yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the<br />table as if she were getting into bed.<br /><br />"All right," said Daisy. "What'll we plan?" She turned to me helplessly.<br />"What do people plan?"<br /><br />Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her<br />little finger.<br /><br />"Look!" she complained. "I hurt it."<br /><br />We all looked--the knuckle was black and blue.<br /><br />"You did it, Tom," she said accusingly. "I know you didn't mean to<br />but you DID do it. That's what I get for marrying a brute of a man,<br />a great big hulking physical specimen of a----"<br /><br />"I hate that word hulking," objected Tom crossly, "even in kidding."<br /><br />"Hulking," insisted Daisy.<br /><br />Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a<br />bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool<br />as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all<br />desire. They were here--and they accepted Tom and me, making only a<br />polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew<br />that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too<br />would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the<br />West where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its<br />close in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer<br />nervous dread of the moment itself.<br /><br />"You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy," I confessed on my second glass<br />of corky but rather impressive claret. "Can't you talk about crops or<br />something?"<br /><br />I meant nothing in particular by this remark but it was taken up in an<br />unexpected way.<br /><br />"Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom violently.<br />"I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read<br />'The Rise of the Coloured Empires' by this man Goddard?"<br /><br />"Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone.<br /><br />"Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if<br />we don't look out the white race will be--will be utterly submerged.<br />It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."<br /><br />"Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy with an expression of<br />unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them.<br />What was that word we----"<br /><br />"Well, these books are all scientific," insisted Tom, glancing at her<br />impatiently. "This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us<br />who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have<br />control of things."<br /><br />"We've got to beat them down," whispered Daisy, winking ferociously<br />toward the fervent sun.<br /><br />"You ought to live in California--" began Miss Baker but Tom<br />interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.<br /><br />"This idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are and you are<br />and----" After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a<br />slight nod and she winked at me again. "--and we've produced all the<br />things that go to make civilization--oh, science and art and all that.<br />Do you see?"<br /><br />There was something pathetic in his concentration as if his complacency,<br />more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more. When, almost<br />immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch Daisy<br />seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned toward me.<br /><br />"I'll tell you a family secret," she whispered enthusiastically. "It's<br />about the butler's nose. Do you want to hear about the butler's nose?"<br /><br />"That's why I came over tonight."<br /><br />"Well, he wasn't always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher for<br />some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people.<br />He had to polish it from morning till night until finally it began to<br />affect his nose----"<br /><br />"Things went from bad to worse," suggested Miss Baker.<br /><br />"Yes. Things went from bad to worse until finally he had to give up<br />his position."<br /><br />For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon<br />her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as<br />I listened--then the glow faded, each light deserting her with<br />lingering regret like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.<br /><br />The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom's ear<br />whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair and without a word went<br />inside. As if his absence quickened something within her Daisy leaned<br />forward again, her voice glowing and singing.<br /><br />"I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a--of a rose, an<br />absolute rose. Doesn't he?" She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation.<br />"An absolute rose?"<br /><br />This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only<br />extemporizing but a stirring warmth flowed from her as if her<br />heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those<br />breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the<br />table and excused herself and went into the house.<br /><br />Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of<br />meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said "Sh!" in<br />a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room<br />beyond and Miss Baker leaned forward, unashamed, trying to hear. The<br />murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted<br />excitedly, and then ceased altogether.<br /><br />"This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbor----" I said.<br /><br />"Don't talk. I want to hear what happens."<br /><br />"Is something happening?" I inquired innocently.<br /><br />"You mean to say you don't know?" said Miss Baker, honestly surprised.<br />"I thought everybody knew."<br /><br />"I don't."<br /><br />"Why----" she said hesitantly, "Tom's got some woman in New York."<br /><br />"Got some woman?" I repeated blankly.<br /><br />Miss Baker nodded.<br /><br />"She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner-time. Don't<br />you think?"<br /><br />Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of<br />a dress and the crunch of leather boots and Tom and Daisy were back<br />at the table.<br /><br />"It couldn't be helped!" cried Daisy with tense gayety.<br /><br />She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me and<br />continued: "I looked outdoors for a minute and it's very romantic<br />outdoors. There's a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale<br />come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He's singing away----" her<br />voice sang "----It's romantic, isn't it, Tom?"<br /><br />"Very romantic," he said, and then miserably to me: "If it's light enough<br />after dinner I want to take you down to the stables."<br /><br />The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her<br />head decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all<br />subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the<br />last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again,<br />pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at every<br />one and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn't guess what Daisy and Tom<br />were thinking but I doubt if even Miss Baker who seemed to have<br />mastered a certain hardy skepticism was able utterly to put this fifth<br />guest's shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament<br />the situation might have seemed intriguing--my own instinct was to<br />telephone immediately for the police.<br /><br />The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss<br />Baker, with several feet of twilight between them strolled back into<br />the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while<br />trying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf I followed<br />Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. In<br />its deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee.<br /><br />Daisy took her face in her hands, as if feeling its lovely shape, and<br />her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent<br />emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some<br />sedative questions about her little girl.<br /><br />"We don't know each other very well, Nick," she said suddenly.<br />"Even if we are cousins. You didn't come to my wedding."<br /><br />"I wasn't back from the war."<br /><br />"That's true." She hesitated. "Well, I've had a very bad time, Nick,<br />and I'm pretty cynical about everything."<br /><br />Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn't say any more,<br />and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her<br />daughter.<br /><br />"I suppose she talks, and--eats, and everything."<br /><br />"Oh, yes." She looked at me absently. "Listen, Nick; let me tell you what<br />I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?"<br /><br />"Very much."<br /><br />"It'll show you how I've gotten to feel about--things. Well, she was less<br />than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether<br />with an utterly abandoned feeling and asked the nurse right away if it<br />was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head<br />away and wept. 'All right,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope<br />she'll be a fool--that's the best thing a girl can be in this world,<br />a beautiful little fool."<br /><br />"You see I think everything's terrible anyhow," she went on in a<br />convinced way. "Everybody thinks so--the most advanced people. And I KNOW.<br />I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything."<br />Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom's, and she<br />laughed with thrilling scorn. "Sophisticated--God, I'm sophisticated!"<br /><br />The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention,<br />my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said.<br />It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick<br />of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited,<br />and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk<br />on her lovely face as if she had asserted her membership in a rather<br />distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.<br /><br /><br />Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light. Tom and Miss Baker<br />sat at either end of the long couch and she read aloud to him from<br />the "Saturday Evening Post"--the words, murmurous and<br />uninflected, running together in a soothing tune. The lamp-light,<br />bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair,<br />glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender<br />muscles in her arms.<br /><br />When we came in she held us silent for a moment with a lifted hand.<br /><br />"To be continued," she said, tossing the magazine on the table, "in our<br />very next issue."<br /><br />Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she<br />stood up.<br /><br />"Ten o'clock," she remarked, apparently finding the time on the<br />ceiling. "Time for this good girl to go to bed."<br /><br />"Jordan's going to play in the tournament tomorrow," explained Daisy,<br />"over at Westchester."<br /><br />"Oh,--you're JORdan Baker."<br /><br />I knew now why her face was familiar--its pleasing contemptuous<br />expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of<br />the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I<br />had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story,<br />but what it was I had forgotten long ago.<br /><br />"Good night," she said softly. "Wake me at eight, won't you."<br /><br />"If you'll get up."<br /><br />"I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon."<br /><br />"Of course you will," confirmed Daisy. "In fact I think I'll arrange<br />a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I'll sort of--oh--fling you<br />together. You know--lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push<br />you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing----"<br /><br />"Good night," called Miss Baker from the stairs. "I haven't heard a word."<br /><br />"She's a nice girl," said Tom after a moment. "They oughtn't to let her<br />run around the country this way."<br /><br />"Who oughtn't to?" inquired Daisy coldly.<br /><br />"Her family."<br /><br />"Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Nick's<br />going to look after her, aren't you, Nick? She's going to spend lots of<br />week-ends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be very<br />good for her."<br /><br />Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment in silence.<br /><br />"Is she from New York?" I asked quickly.<br /><br />"From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our<br />beautiful white----"<br /><br />"Did you give Nick a little heart to heart talk on the veranda?"<br />demanded Tom suddenly.<br /><br />"Did I?" She looked at me. "I can't seem to remember, but I think<br />we talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I'm sure we did. It sort of<br />crept up on us and first thing you know----"<br /><br />"Don't believe everything you hear, Nick," he advised me.<br /><br />I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes later<br />I got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood side by<br />side in a cheerful square of light. As I started my motor Daisy<br />peremptorily called "Wait!<br /><br />"I forgot to ask you something, and it's important. We heard you were<br />engaged to a girl out West."<br /><br />"That's right," corroborated Tom kindly. "We heard that you were<br />engaged."<br /><br />"It's libel. I'm too poor."<br /><br />"But we heard it," insisted Daisy, surprising me by opening up again in<br />a flower-like way. "We heard it from three people so it must be true."<br /><br />Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn't even vaguely<br />engaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns was one of the<br />reasons I had come east. You can't stop going with an old friend on<br />account of rumors and on the other hand I had no intention of being<br />rumored into marriage.<br /><br />Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely<br />rich--nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove<br />away. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of<br />the house, child in arms--but apparently there were no such intentions<br />in her head. As for Tom, the fact that he "had some woman in New York"<br />was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book.<br />Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his<br />sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.<br /><br />Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside<br />garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I<br />reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for<br />a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown<br />off, leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees and<br />a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the<br />frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the<br />moonlight and turning my head to watch it I saw that I was not<br />alone--fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my<br />neighbor's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets<br />regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely<br />movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested<br />that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was<br />his of our local heavens.<br /><br />I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and<br />that would do for an introduction. But I didn't call to him for he gave<br />a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone--he stretched out his<br />arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him<br />I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward--and<br />distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away,<br />that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby<br />he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.<br /></span></pre>Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13783659974416042562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5033984040361137541.post-25622898140986830212007-02-06T07:51:00.000-08:002007-02-06T07:53:55.820-08:00Chapter 9<pre style="font-family: verdana;">After two years I remember the rest of that day, and that night and the<br />next day, only as an endless drill of police and photographers and<br />newspaper men in and out of Gatsby's front door. A rope stretched<br />across the main gate and a policeman by it kept out the curious, but<br />little boys soon discovered that they could enter through my yard and<br />there were always a few of them clustered open-mouthed about the pool.<br />Someone with a positive manner, perhaps a detective, used the<br />expression "mad man" as he bent over Wilson's body that afternoon, and<br />the adventitious authority of his voice set the key for the newspaper<br />reports next morning.<br /><br />Most of those reports were a nightmare--grotesque, circumstantial,<br />eager and untrue. When Michaelis's testimony at the inquest brought to<br />light Wilson's suspicions of his wife I thought the whole tale would<br />shortly be served up in racy pasquinade--but Catherine, who might have<br />said anything, didn't say a word. She showed a surprising amount of<br />character about it too--looked at the coroner with determined eyes under<br />that corrected brow of hers and swore that her sister had never seen<br />Gatsby, that her sister was completely happy with her husband, that her<br />sister had been into no mischief whatever. She convinced herself of it<br />and cried into her handkerchief as if the very suggestion was more<br />than she could endure. So Wilson was reduced to a man "deranged by<br />grief" in order that the case might remain in its simplest form. And<br />it rested there.<br /><br />But all this part of it seemed remote and unessential. I found myself on<br />Gatsby's side, and alone. From the moment I telephoned news of<br />the catastrophe to West Egg village, every surmise about him, and<br />every practical question, was referred to me. At first I was surprised and<br />confused; then, as he lay in his house and didn't move or breathe or<br />speak hour upon hour it grew upon me that I was responsible, because no<br />one else was interested--interested, I mean, with that intense personal<br />interest to which every one has some vague right at the end.<br /><br />I called up Daisy half an hour after we found him, called her<br />instinctively and without hesitation. But she and Tom had gone away<br />early that afternoon, and taken baggage with them.<br /><br />"Left no address?"<br /><br />"No."<br /><br />"Say when they'd be back?"<br /><br />"No."<br /><br />"Any idea where they are? How I could reach them?"<br /><br />"I don't know. Can't say."<br /><br />I wanted to get somebody for him. I wanted to go into the room where he<br />lay and reassure him: "I'll get somebody for you, Gatsby. Don't worry.<br />Just trust me and I'll get somebody for you----"<br /><br />Meyer Wolfshiem's name wasn't in the phone book. The butler gave me his<br />office address on Broadway and I called Information, but by the time I<br />had the number it was long after five and no one answered the phone.<br /><br />"Will you ring again?"<br /><br />"I've rung them three times."<br /><br />"It's very important."<br /><br />"Sorry. I'm afraid no one's there."<br /><br />I went back to the drawing room and thought for an instant that they were<br />chance visitors, all these official people who suddenly filled it. But<br />as they drew back the sheet and looked at Gatsby with unmoved eyes,<br />his protest continued in my brain.<br /><br />"Look here, old sport, you've got to get somebody for me. You've got<br />to try hard. I can't go through this alone."<br /><br />Some one started to ask me questions but I broke away and going upstairs<br />looked hastily through the unlocked parts of his desk--he'd never told me<br />definitely that his parents were dead. But there was nothing--only the<br />picture of Dan Cody, a token of forgotten violence staring down from<br />the wall.<br /><br />Next morning I sent the butler to New York with a letter to Wolfshiem<br />which asked for information and urged him to come out on the next<br />train. That request seemed superfluous when I wrote it. I was sure he'd<br />start when he saw the newspapers, just as I was sure there'd be a wire<br />from Daisy before noon--but neither a wire nor Mr. Wolfshiem arrived, no<br />one arrived except more police and photographers and newspaper men.<br />When the butler brought back Wolfshiem's answer I began to have a<br />feeling of defiance, of scornful solidarity between Gatsby and me<br />against them all.<br /><br /><br />_Dear Mr. Carraway. This has been one of the most terrible shocks of my<br />life to me I hardly can believe it that it is true at all. Such a mad<br />act as that man did should make us all think. I cannot come down now as<br />I am tied up in some very important business and cannot get mixed up in<br />this thing now. If there is anything I can do a little later let me<br />know in a letter by Edgar. I hardly know where I am when I hear about a<br />thing like this and am completely knocked down and out.<br /><br /> Yours truly<br /> MEYER WOLFSHIEM_<br /><br />and then hasty addenda beneath:<br /><br />_Let me know about the funeral etc do not know his family at all._<br /><br /><br />When the phone rang that afternoon and Long Distance said Chicago was<br />calling I thought this would be Daisy at last. But the connection came<br />through as a man's voice, very thin and far away.<br /><br />"This is Slagle speaking. . . ."<br /><br />"Yes?" The name was unfamiliar.<br /><br />"Hell of a note, isn't it? Get my wire?"<br /><br />"There haven't been any wires."<br /><br />"Young Parke's in trouble," he said rapidly. "They picked him up when he<br />handed the bonds over the counter. They got a circular from New York<br />giving 'em the numbers just five minutes before. What d'you know about<br />that, hey? You never can tell in these hick towns----"<br /><br />"Hello!" I interrupted breathlessly. "Look here--this isn't Mr. Gatsby.<br />Mr. Gatsby's dead."<br /><br />There was a long silence on the other end of the wire, followed by an<br />exclamation . . . then a quick squawk as the connection was broken.<br /><br /><br />I think it was on the third day that a telegram signed Henry C. Gatz<br />arrived from a town in Minnesota. It said only that the sender was<br />leaving immediately and to postpone the funeral until he came.<br /><br />It was Gatsby's father, a solemn old man very helpless and dismayed,<br />bundled up in a long cheap ulster against the warm September day. His<br />eyes leaked continuously with excitement and when I took the bag and<br />umbrella from his hands he began to pull so incessantly at his sparse<br />grey beard that I had difficulty in getting off his coat. He was on the<br />point of collapse so I took him into the music room and made him sit<br />down while I sent for something to eat. But he wouldn't eat and the<br />glass of milk spilled from his trembling hand.<br /><br />"I saw it in the Chicago newspaper," he said. "It was all in the Chicago<br />newspaper. I started right away."<br /><br />"I didn't know how to reach you."<br /><br />His eyes, seeing nothing, moved ceaselessly about the room.<br /><br />"It was a mad man," he said. "He must have been mad."<br /><br />"Wouldn't you like some coffee?" I urged him.<br /><br />"I don't want anything. I'm all right now, Mr.----"<br /><br />"Carraway."<br /><br />"Well, I'm all right now. Where have they got Jimmy?"<br /><br />I took him into the drawing-room, where his son lay, and left him there.<br />Some little boys had come up on the steps and were looking into the hall;<br />when I told them who had arrived they went reluctantly away.<br /><br />After a little while Mr. Gatz opened the door and came out, his mouth<br />ajar, his face flushed slightly, his eyes leaking isolated and<br />unpunctual tears. He had reached an age where death no longer has the<br />quality of ghastly surprise, and when he looked around him now for the<br />first time and saw the height and splendor of the hall and the great<br />rooms opening out from it into other rooms his grief began to be mixed<br />with an awed pride. I helped him to a bedroom upstairs; while he took<br />off his coat and vest I told him that all arrangements had been<br />deferred until he came.<br /><br />"I didn't know what you'd want, Mr. Gatsby----"<br /><br />"Gatz is my name."<br /><br />"--Mr. Gatz. I thought you might want to take the body west."<br /><br />He shook his head.<br /><br />"Jimmy always liked it better down East. He rose up to his position in<br />the East. Were you a friend of my boy's, Mr.--?"<br /><br />"We were close friends."<br /><br />"He had a big future before him, you know. He was only a young man but<br />he had a lot of brain power here."<br /><br />He touched his head impressively and I nodded.<br /><br />"If he'd of lived he'd of been a great man. A man like James J. Hill.<br />He'd of helped build up the country."<br /><br />"That's true," I said, uncomfortably.<br /><br />He fumbled at the embroidered coverlet, trying to take it from the bed,<br />and lay down stiffly--was instantly asleep.<br /><br />That night an obviously frightened person called up and demanded to know<br />who I was before he would give his name.<br /><br />"This is Mr. Carraway," I said.<br /><br />"Oh--" He sounded relieved. "This is Klipspringer."<br /><br />I was relieved too for that seemed to promise another friend<br />at Gatsby's grave. I didn't want it to be in the papers and draw<br />a sightseeing crowd so I'd been calling up a few people myself.<br />They were hard to find.<br /><br />"The funeral's tomorrow," I said. "Three o'clock, here at the house.<br />I wish you'd tell anybody who'd be interested."<br /><br />"Oh, I will," he broke out hastily. "Of course I'm not likely to see<br />anybody, but if I do."<br /><br />His tone made me suspicious.<br /><br />"Of course you'll be there yourself."<br /><br />"Well, I'll certainly try. What I called up about is----"<br /><br />"Wait a minute," I interrupted. "How about saying you'll come?"<br /><br />"Well, the fact is--the truth of the matter is that I'm staying with<br />some people up here in Greenwich and they rather expect me to be with<br />them tomorrow. In fact there's a sort of picnic or something.<br />Of course I'll do my very best to get away."<br /><br />I ejaculated an unrestrained "Huh!" and he must have heard me for he went<br />on nervously:<br /><br />"What I called up about was a pair of shoes I left there. I wonder if<br />it'd be too much trouble to have the butler send them on. You<br />see they're tennis shoes and I'm sort of helpless without them. My<br />address is care of B. F.----"<br /><br />I didn't hear the rest of the name because I hung up the receiver.<br /><br />After that I felt a certain shame for Gatsby--one gentleman to whom I<br />telephoned implied that he had got what he deserved. However, that was<br />my fault, for he was one of those who used to sneer most bitterly at<br />Gatsby on the courage of Gatsby's liquor and I should have known<br />better than to call him.<br /><br />The morning of the funeral I went up to New York to see Meyer<br />Wolfshiem; I couldn't seem to reach him any other way. The door that I<br />pushed open on the advice of an elevator boy was marked "The Swastika<br />Holding Company" and at first there didn't seem to be any one inside.<br />But when I'd shouted "Hello" several times in vain an argument broke<br />out behind a partition and presently a lovely Jewess appeared at an<br />interior door and scrutinized me with black hostile eyes.<br /><br />"Nobody's in," she said. "Mr. Wolfshiem's gone to Chicago."<br /><br />The first part of this was obviously untrue for someone had begun to<br />whistle "The Rosary," tunelessly, inside.<br /><br />"Please say that Mr. Carraway wants to see him."<br /><br />"I can't get him back from Chicago, can I?"<br /><br />At this moment a voice, unmistakably Wolfshiem's called "Stella!"<br />from the other side of the door.<br /><br />"Leave your name on the desk," she said quickly. "I'll give it to him<br />when he gets back."<br /><br />"But I know he's there."<br /><br />She took a step toward me and began to slide her hands indignantly up<br />and down her hips.<br /><br />"You young men think you can force your way in here any time," she<br />scolded. "We're getting sickantired of it. When I say he's in Chicago,<br />he's in ChiCAgo."<br /><br />I mentioned Gatsby.<br /><br />"Oh--h!" She looked at me over again. "Will you just--what was your name?"<br /><br />She vanished. In a moment Meyer Wolfshiem stood solemnly in the doorway,<br />holding out both hands. He drew me into his office, remarking in a<br />reverent voice that it was a sad time for all of us, and offered me<br />a cigar.<br /><br />"My memory goes back to when I first met him," he said. "A young<br />major just out of the army and covered over with medals he got<br />in the war. He was so hard up he had to keep on wearing his uniform<br />because he couldn't buy some regular clothes. First time I saw him was<br />when he come into Winebrenner's poolroom at Forty-third Street and<br />asked for a job. He hadn't eat anything for a couple of days. 'Come on<br />have some lunch with me,' I sid. He ate more than four dollars' worth of<br />food in half an hour."<br /><br />"Did you start him in business?" I inquired.<br /><br />"Start him! I made him."<br /><br />"Oh."<br /><br />"I raised him up out of nothing, right out of the gutter. I saw right<br />away he was a fine appearing, gentlemanly young man, and when he told<br />me he was an Oggsford I knew I could use him good. I got him to join up<br />in the American Legion and he used to stand high there. Right off he<br />did some work for a client of mine up to Albany. We were so thick like<br />that in everything--" He held up two bulbous fingers "--always<br />together."<br /><br />I wondered if this partnership had included the World's Series transaction<br />in 1919.<br /><br />"Now he's dead," I said after a moment. "You were his closest friend,<br />so I know you'll want to come to his funeral this afternoon."<br /><br />"I'd like to come."<br /><br />"Well, come then."<br /><br />The hair in his nostrils quivered slightly and as he shook his head his<br />eyes filled with tears.<br /><br />"I can't do it--I can't get mixed up in it," he said.<br /><br />"There's nothing to get mixed up in. It's all over now."<br /><br />"When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it in any way.<br />I keep out. When I was a young man it was different--if a friend of mine<br />died, no matter how, I stuck with them to the end. You may think that's<br />sentimental but I mean it--to the bitter end."<br /><br />I saw that for some reason of his own he was determined not to come,<br />so I stood up.<br /><br />"Are you a college man?" he inquired suddenly.<br /><br />For a moment I thought he was going to suggest a "gonnegtion" but he<br />only nodded and shook my hand.<br /><br />"Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not<br />after he is dead," he suggested. "After that my own rule is to let<br />everything alone."<br /><br />When I left his office the sky had turned dark and I got back to West Egg<br />in a drizzle. After changing my clothes I went next door and found<br />Mr. Gatz walking up and down excitedly in the hall. His pride in his<br />son and in his son's possessions was continually increasing and now he<br />had something to show me.<br /><br />"Jimmy sent me this picture." He took out his wallet with trembling<br />fingers. "Look there."<br /><br />It was a photograph of the house, cracked in the corners and dirty with<br />many hands. He pointed out every detail to me eagerly. "Look there!" and<br />then sought admiration from my eyes. He had shown it so often that I think<br />it was more real to him now than the house itself.<br /><br />"Jimmy sent it to me. I think it's a very pretty picture. It shows up<br />well."<br /><br />"Very well. Had you seen him lately?"<br /><br />"He come out to see me two years ago and bought me the house I live in<br />now. Of course we was broke up when he run off from home but I see now<br />there was a reason for it. He knew he had a big future in front of him.<br />And ever since he made a success he was very generous with me."<br /><br />He seemed reluctant to put away the picture, held it for another minute,<br />lingeringly, before my eyes. Then he returned the wallet and pulled from<br />his pocket a ragged old copy of a book called "Hopalong Cassidy."<br /><br />"Look here, this is a book he had when he was a boy. It just shows<br />you."<br /><br />He opened it at the back cover and turned it around for me to see.<br />On the last fly-leaf was printed the word SCHEDULE, and the date<br />September 12th, 1906. And underneath:<br /><br /><br />Rise from bed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.00 A.M.<br />Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling . . . . . . 6.15-6.30 "<br />Study electricity, etc . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.15-8.15 "<br />Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.30-4.30 P.M.<br />Baseball and sports . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.30-5.00 "<br />Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it 5.00-6.00 "<br />Study needed inventions . . . . . . . . . . . 7.00-9.00 "<br /><br /> GENERAL RESOLVES<br /><br />No wasting time at Shafters or [a name, indecipherable]<br />No more smokeing or chewing<br />Bath every other day<br />Read one improving book or magazine per week<br />Save $5.00 [crossed out] $3.00 per week<br />Be better to parents<br /><br /><br />"I come across this book by accident," said the old man. "It just shows<br />you, don't it?"<br /><br />"It just shows you."<br /><br />"Jimmy was bound to get ahead. He always had some resolves like this or<br />something. Do you notice what he's got about improving his mind? He was<br />always great for that. He told me I et like a hog once and I beat him<br />for it."<br /><br />He was reluctant to close the book, reading each item aloud and then<br />looking eagerly at me. I think he rather expected me to copy down the<br />list for my own use.<br /><br />A little before three the Lutheran minister arrived from Flushing and<br />I began to look involuntarily out the windows for other cars. So did<br />Gatsby's father. And as the time passed and the servants came in and<br />stood waiting in the hall, his eyes began to blink anxiously and he<br />spoke of the rain in a worried uncertain way. The minister glanced<br />several times at his watch so I took him aside and asked him to wait<br />for half an hour. But it wasn't any use. Nobody came.<br /><br /><br />About five o'clock our procession of three cars reached the cemetery<br />and stopped in a thick drizzle beside the gate--first a motor hearse,<br />horribly black and wet, then Mr. Gatz and the minister and I in the<br />limousine, and, a little later, four or five servants and the postman<br />from West Egg in Gatsby's station wagon, all wet to the skin. As we<br />started through the gate into the cemetery I heard a car stop and then<br />the sound of someone splashing after us over the soggy ground. I looked<br />around. It was the man with owl-eyed glasses whom I had found<br />marvelling over Gatsby's books in the library one night three months<br />before.<br /><br />I'd never seen him since then. I don't know how he knew about the<br />funeral or even his name. The rain poured down his thick glasses and<br />he took them off and wiped them to see the protecting canvas unrolled<br />from Gatsby's grave.<br /><br />I tried to think about Gatsby then for a moment but he was already too<br />far away and I could only remember, without resentment, that Daisy<br />hadn't sent a message or a flower. Dimly I heard someone murmur<br />"Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on," and then the owl-eyed<br />man said "Amen to that," in a brave voice.<br /><br />We straggled down quickly through the rain to the cars. Owl-Eyes spoke<br />to me by the gate.<br /><br />"I couldn't get to the house," he remarked.<br /><br />"Neither could anybody else."<br /><br />"Go on!" He started. "Why, my God! they used to go there by the<br />hundreds."<br /><br />He took off his glasses and wiped them again outside and in.<br /><br />"The poor son-of-a-bitch," he said.<br /><br /><br />One of my most vivid memories is of coming back west from prep school<br />and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than<br />Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o'clock of a<br />December evening with a few Chicago friends already caught up into<br />their own holiday gayeties to bid them a hasty goodbye. I remember<br />the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This or That's and<br />the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as<br />we caught sight of old acquaintances and the matchings of invitations:<br />"Are you going to the Ordways'? the Herseys'? the Schultzes'?"<br />and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands.<br />And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul<br />Railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside<br />the gate.<br /><br />When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow,<br />began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the<br />dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace<br />came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked<br />back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our<br />identity with this country for one strange hour before we melted<br />indistinguishably into it again.<br /><br />That's my middle west--not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede<br />towns but the thrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street<br />lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly<br />wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a<br />little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent<br />from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are<br />still called through decades by a family's name. I see now that this<br />has been a story of the West, after all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and<br />Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some<br />deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.<br /><br />Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware<br />of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the<br />Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the<br />children and the very old--even then it had always for me a quality of<br />distortion. West Egg especially still figures in my more fantastic<br />dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at<br />once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging<br />sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress<br />suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a<br />drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over<br />the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a<br />house--the wrong house. But no one knows the woman's name, and no one<br />cares.<br /><br />After Gatsby's death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted<br />beyond my eyes' power of correction. So when the blue smoke of brittle<br />leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the<br />line I decided to come back home.<br /><br />There was one thing to be done before I left, an awkward, unpleasant<br />thing that perhaps had better have been let alone. But I wanted to<br />leave things in order and not just trust that obliging and indifferent<br />sea to sweep my refuse away. I saw Jordan Baker and talked over and<br />around what had happened to us together and what had happened<br />afterward to me, and she lay perfectly still listening in a big<br />chair.<br /><br />She was dressed to play golf and I remember thinking she looked like a<br />good illustration, her chin raised a little, jauntily, her hair the<br />color of an autumn leaf, her face the same brown tint as the fingerless<br />glove on her knee. When I had finished she told me without comment that<br />she was engaged to another man. I doubted that though there were<br />several she could have married at a nod of her head but I pretended to<br />be surprised. For just a minute I wondered if I wasn't making a<br />mistake, then I thought it all over again quickly and got up to say<br />goodbye.<br /><br />"Nevertheless you did throw me over," said Jordan suddenly. "You threw me<br />over on the telephone. I don't give a damn about you now but it was a<br />new experience for me and I felt a little dizzy for a while."<br /><br />We shook hands.<br /><br />"Oh, and do you remember--" she added, "----a conversation we had once<br />about driving a car?"<br /><br />"Why--not exactly."<br /><br />"You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver?<br />Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I? I mean it was careless of me<br />to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest,<br />straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride."<br /><br />"I'm thirty," I said. "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call<br />it honor."<br /><br />She didn't answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously<br />sorry, I turned away.<br /><br /><br />One afternoon late in October I saw Tom Buchanan. He was walking ahead<br />of me along Fifth Avenue in his alert, aggressive way, his hands out a<br />little from his body as if to fight off interference, his head moving<br />sharply here and there, adapting itself to his restless eyes. Just as I<br />slowed up to avoid overtaking him he stopped and began frowning into<br />the windows of a jewelry store. Suddenly he saw me and walked back<br />holding out his hand.<br /><br />"What's the matter, Nick? Do you object to shaking hands with me?"<br /><br />"Yes. You know what I think of you."<br /><br />"You're crazy, Nick," he said quickly. "Crazy as hell. I don't know<br />what's the matter with you."<br /><br />"Tom," I inquired, "what did you say to Wilson that afternoon?"<br /><br />He stared at me without a word and I knew I had guessed right about<br />those missing hours. I started to turn away but he took a step after me<br />and grabbed my arm.<br /><br />"I told him the truth," he said. "He came to the door while we were<br />getting ready to leave and when I sent down word that we weren't in he<br />tried to force his way upstairs. He was crazy enough to kill me if I<br />hadn't told him who owned the car. His hand was on a revolver in his<br />pocket every minute he was in the house----" He broke off defiantly.<br />"What if I did tell him? That fellow had it coming to him. He threw<br />dust into your eyes just like he did in Daisy's but he was a tough<br />one. He ran over Myrtle like you'd run over a dog and never even stopped<br />his car."<br /><br />There was nothing I could say, except the one unutterable fact<br />that it wasn't true.<br /><br />"And if you think I didn't have my share of suffering--look here, when I<br />went to give up that flat and saw that damn box of dog biscuits sitting<br />there on the sideboard I sat down and cried like a baby. By God it<br />was awful----"<br /><br />I couldn't forgive him or like him but I saw that what he had done was,<br />to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused.<br />They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and<br />creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast<br />carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other<br />people clean up the mess they had made. . . .<br /><br />I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as<br />though I were talking to a child. Then he went into the jewelry store to<br />buy a pearl necklace--or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons--rid of my<br />provincial squeamishness forever.<br /><br /><br />Gatsby's house was still empty when I left--the grass on his lawn had<br />grown as long as mine. One of the taxi drivers in the village never<br />took a fare past the entrance gate without stopping for a minute and<br />pointing inside; perhaps it was he who drove Daisy and Gatsby over to<br />East Egg the night of the accident and perhaps he had made a story<br />about it all his own. I didn't want to hear it and I avoided him when I<br />got off the train.<br /><br />I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling<br />parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the<br />music and the laughter faint and incessant from his garden and the<br />cars going up and down his drive. One night I did hear a material car<br />there and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I didn't<br />investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the<br />ends of the earth and didn't know that the party was over.<br /><br />On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer,<br />I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once<br />more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a<br />piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight and I erased it,<br />drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the<br />beach and sprawled out on the sand.<br /><br />Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any<br />lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound.<br />And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away<br />until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered<br />once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world.<br />Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had<br />once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams;<br />for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the<br />presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation<br />he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in<br />history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.<br /><br />And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of<br />Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of<br />Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must<br />have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not<br />know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity<br />beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under<br />the night.<br /><br />Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by<br />year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow<br />we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine<br />morning----<br /><br />So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into<br />the past.<br /><br /><br /><br /></pre><div style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;">THE END</div><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span>Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13783659974416042562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5033984040361137541.post-52064994501064311702007-02-06T07:47:00.000-08:002007-02-06T07:51:18.017-08:00Chapter 8<pre style="font-family: verdana;">I couldn't sleep all night; a fog-horn was groaning incessantly on the<br />Sound, and I tossed half-sick between grotesque reality and savage<br />frightening dreams. Toward dawn I heard a taxi go up Gatsby's drive<br />and immediately I jumped out of bed and began to dress--I felt that I<br />had something to tell him, something to warn him about and morning<br />would be too late.<br /><br />Crossing his lawn I saw that his front door was still open and he was<br />leaning against a table in the hall, heavy with dejection or sleep.<br /><br />"Nothing happened," he said wanly. "I waited, and about four o'clock she<br />came to the window and stood there for a minute and then turned out<br />the light."<br /><br />His house had never seemed so enormous to me as it did that night when we<br />hunted through the great rooms for cigarettes. We pushed aside curtains<br />that were like pavilions and felt over innumerable feet of dark wall for<br />electric light switches--once I tumbled with a sort of splash upon the<br />keys of a ghostly piano. There was an inexplicable amount of dust<br />everywhere and the rooms were musty as though they hadn't been aired for<br />many days. I found the humidor on an unfamiliar table with two stale dry<br />cigarettes inside. Throwing open the French windows of the<br />drawing-room we sat smoking out into the darkness.<br /><br />"You ought to go away," I said. "It's pretty certain they'll trace<br />your car."<br /><br />"Go away NOW, old sport?"<br /><br />"Go to Atlantic City for a week, or up to Montreal."<br /><br />He wouldn't consider it. He couldn't possibly leave Daisy until he knew<br />what she was going to do. He was clutching at some last hope and I<br />couldn't bear to shake him free.<br /><br />It was this night that he told me the strange story of his youth with<br />Dan Cody--told it to me because "Jay Gatsby" had broken up like glass<br />against Tom's hard malice and the long secret extravaganza was played<br />out. I think that he would have acknowledged anything, now, without<br />reserve, but he wanted to talk about Daisy.<br /><br />She was the first "nice" girl he had ever known. In various unrevealed<br />capacities he had come in contact with such people but always<br />with indiscernible barbed wire between. He found her excitingly<br />desirable. He went to her house, at first with other officers<br />from Camp Taylor, then alone. It amazed him--he had never been<br />in such a beautiful house before. But what gave it an air of breathless<br />intensity was that Daisy lived there--it was as casual a thing to her<br />as his tent out at camp was to him. There was a ripe mystery about it,<br />a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other<br />bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its<br />corridors and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in<br />lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year's shining<br />motor cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered. It<br />excited him too that many men had already loved Daisy--it increased<br />her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about the house,<br />pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions.<br /><br />But he knew that he was in Daisy's house by a colossal accident.<br />However glorious might be his future as Jay Gatsby, he was at present a<br />penniless young man without a past, and at any moment the invisible<br />cloak of his uniform might slip from his shoulders. So he made<br />the most of his time. He took what he could get, ravenously and<br />unscrupulously--eventually he took Daisy one still October night,<br />took her because he had no real right to touch her hand.<br /><br />He might have despised himself, for he had certainly taken her under<br />false pretenses. I don't mean that he had traded on his phantom<br />millions, but he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he<br />let her believe that he was a person from much the same stratum as<br />herself--that he was fully able to take care of her. As a matter of<br />fact he had no such facilities--he had no comfortable family standing<br />behind him and he was liable at the whim of an impersonal government<br />to be blown anywhere about the world.<br /><br />But he didn't despise himself and it didn't turn out as he had<br />imagined. He had intended, probably, to take what he could and go--but<br />now he found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail.<br />He knew that Daisy was extraordinary but he didn't realize just how<br />extraordinary a "nice" girl could be. She vanished into her rich<br />house, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby--nothing. He felt<br />married to her, that was all.<br /><br />When they met again two days later it was Gatsby who was breathless,<br />who was somehow betrayed. Her porch was bright with the bought<br />luxury of star-shine; the wicker of the settee squeaked fashionably<br />as she turned toward him and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth.<br />She had caught a cold and it made her voice huskier and more charming<br />than ever and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery<br />that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes<br />and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot<br />struggles of the poor.<br /><br /><br />"I can't describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her,<br />old sport. I even hoped for a while that she'd throw me over, but she<br />didn't, because she was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot<br />because I knew different things from her. . . . Well, there I was,<br />way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and<br />all of a sudden I didn't care. What was the use of doing great<br />things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going<br />to do?"<br /><br />On the last afternoon before he went abroad he sat with Daisy in<br />his arms for a long, silent time. It was a cold fall day with fire<br />in the room and her cheeks flushed. Now and then she moved and he<br />changed his arm a little and once he kissed her dark shining hair. The<br />afternoon had made them tranquil for a while as if to give them a deep<br />memory for the long parting the next day promised. They had never been<br />closer in their month of love nor communicated more profoundly one<br />with another than when she brushed silent lips against his coat's<br />shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though<br />she were asleep.<br /><br /><br />He did extraordinarily well in the war. He was a captain before he went<br />to the front and following the Argonne battles he got his majority and<br />the command of the divisional machine guns. After the Armistice<br />he tried frantically to get home but some complication or<br />misunderstanding sent him to Oxford instead. He was worried now--there<br />was a quality of nervous despair in Daisy's letters. She didn't see why<br />he couldn't come. She was feeling the pressure of the world outside<br />and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be<br />reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.<br /><br />For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids<br />and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of<br />the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new<br />tunes. All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the<br />"Beale Street Blues" while a hundred pairs of golden and silver<br />slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the grey tea hour there were<br />always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low sweet fever,<br />while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the<br />sad horns around the floor.<br /><br />Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the<br />season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with<br />half a dozen men and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and<br />chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor<br />beside her bed. And all the time something within her was crying for a<br />decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately--and the decision<br />must be made by some force--of love, of money, of unquestionable<br />practicality--that was close at hand.<br /><br />That force took shape in the middle of spring with the arrival of Tom<br />Buchanan. There was a wholesome bulkiness about his person and his<br />position and Daisy was flattered. Doubtless there was a certain<br />struggle and a certain relief. The letter reached Gatsby while he was<br />still at Oxford.<br /><br /><br />It was dawn now on Long Island and we went about opening the rest of<br />the windows downstairs, filling the house with grey turning,<br />gold turning light. The shadow of a tree fell abruptly across the dew<br />and ghostly birds began to sing among the blue leaves. There was a<br />slow pleasant movement in the air, scarcely a wind, promising a cool<br />lovely day.<br /><br />"I don't think she ever loved him." Gatsby turned around from a window<br />and looked at me challengingly. "You must remember, old sport, she was<br />very excited this afternoon. He told her those things in a way that<br />frightened her--that made it look as if I was some kind of cheap sharper.<br />And the result was she hardly knew what she was saying."<br /><br />He sat down gloomily.<br /><br />"Of course she might have loved him, just for a minute, when they were<br />first married--and loved me more even then, do you see?"<br /><br />Suddenly he came out with a curious remark:<br /><br />"In any case," he said, "it was just personal."<br /><br />What could you make of that, except to suspect some intensity in<br />his conception of the affair that couldn't be measured?<br /><br />He came back from France when Tom and Daisy were still on their wedding<br />trip, and made a miserable but irresistible journey to Louisville<br />on the last of his army pay. He stayed there a week, walking the<br />streets where their footsteps had clicked together through the<br />November night and revisiting the out-of-the-way places to which<br />they had driven in her white car. Just as Daisy's house had always<br />seemed to him more mysterious and gay than other houses so his<br />idea of the city itself, even though she was gone from it, was pervaded<br />with a melancholy beauty.<br /><br />He left feeling that if he had searched harder he might have found<br />her--that he was leaving her behind. The day-coach--he was penniless<br />now--was hot. He went out to the open vestibule and sat down on a<br />folding-chair, and the station slid away and the backs of unfamiliar<br />buildings moved by. Then out into the spring fields, where a yellow<br />trolley raced them for a minute with people in it who might once have<br />seen the pale magic of her face along the casual street.<br /><br />The track curved and now it was going away from the sun which, as it<br />sank lower, seemed to spread itself in benediction over the vanishing<br />city where she had drawn her breath. He stretched out his hand<br />desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of<br />the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too<br />fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of<br />it, the freshest and the best, forever.<br /><br /><br />It was nine o'clock when we finished breakfast and went out on the<br />porch. The night had made a sharp difference in the weather and there<br />was an autumn flavor in the air. The gardener, the last one of Gatsby's<br />former servants, came to the foot of the steps.<br /><br />"I'm going to drain the pool today, Mr. Gatsby. Leaves'll start falling<br />pretty soon and then there's always trouble with the pipes."<br /><br />"Don't do it today," Gatsby answered. He turned to me apologetically.<br />"You know, old sport, I've never used that pool all summer?"<br /><br />I looked at my watch and stood up.<br /><br />"Twelve minutes to my train."<br /><br />I didn't want to go to the city. I wasn't worth a decent stroke of work<br />but it was more than that--I didn't want to leave Gatsby. I missed that<br />train, and then another, before I could get myself away.<br /><br />"I'll call you up," I said finally.<br /><br />"Do, old sport."<br /><br />"I'll call you about noon."<br /><br />We walked slowly down the steps.<br /><br />"I suppose Daisy'll call too." He looked at me anxiously as if he<br />hoped I'd corroborate this.<br /><br />"I suppose so."<br /><br />"Well--goodbye."<br /><br />We shook hands and I started away. Just before I reached the hedge I<br />remembered something and turned around.<br /><br />"They're a rotten crowd," I shouted across the lawn. "You're worth the<br />whole damn bunch put together."<br /><br />I've always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave<br />him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. First he nodded<br />politely, and then his face broke into that radiant and understanding<br />smile, as if we'd been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all the time.<br />His gorgeous pink rag of a suit made a bright spot of color against the<br />white steps and I thought of the night when I first came to his ancestral<br />home three months before. The lawn and drive had been crowded with the<br />faces of those who guessed at his corruption--and he had stood on those<br />steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them goodbye.<br /><br />I thanked him for his hospitality. We were always thanking him for<br />that--I and the others.<br /><br />"Goodbye," I called. "I enjoyed breakfast, Gatsby."<br /><br /><br />Up in the city I tried for a while to list the quotations on an<br />interminable amount of stock, then I fell asleep in my swivel-chair.<br />Just before noon the phone woke me and I started up with sweat<br />breaking out on my forehead. It was Jordan Baker; she often called<br />me up at this hour because the uncertainty of her own movements<br />between hotels and clubs and private houses made her hard to find<br />in any other way. Usually her voice came over the wire as something<br />fresh and cool as if a divot from a green golf links had come<br />sailing in at the office window but this morning it seemed harsh and dry.<br /><br />"I've left Daisy's house," she said. "I'm at Hempstead and I'm going down<br />to Southampton this afternoon."<br /><br />Probably it had been tactful to leave Daisy's house, but the act<br />annoyed me and her next remark made me rigid.<br /><br />"You weren't so nice to me last night."<br /><br />"How could it have mattered then?"<br /><br />Silence for a moment. Then--<br /><br />"However--I want to see you."<br /><br />"I want to see you too."<br /><br />"Suppose I don't go to Southampton, and come into town this afternoon?"<br /><br />"No--I don't think this afternoon."<br /><br />"Very well."<br /><br />"It's impossible this afternoon. Various----"<br /><br />We talked like that for a while and then abruptly we weren't talking any<br />longer. I don't know which of us hung up with a sharp click but I know I<br />didn't care. I couldn't have talked to her across a tea-table that day if<br />I never talked to her again in this world.<br /><br />I called Gatsby's house a few minutes later, but the line was busy. I<br />tried four times; finally an exasperated central told me the wire was<br />being kept open for long distance from Detroit. Taking out my<br />time-table I drew a small circle around the three-fifty train. Then I<br />leaned back in my chair and tried to think. It was just noon.<br /><br /><br />When I passed the ashheaps on the train that morning I had crossed<br />deliberately to the other side of the car. I suppose there'd be a<br />curious crowd around there all day with little boys searching for dark<br />spots in the dust and some garrulous man telling over and over what<br />had happened until it became less and less real even to him and he<br />could tell it no longer and Myrtle Wilson's tragic achievement was<br />forgotten. Now I want to go back a little and tell what happened at the<br />garage after we left there the night before.<br /><br />They had difficulty in locating the sister, Catherine. She must<br />have broken her rule against drinking that night for when she<br />arrived she was stupid with liquor and unable to understand that the<br />ambulance had already gone to Flushing. When they convinced her of<br />this she immediately fainted as if that was the intolerable part of<br />the affair. Someone kind or curious took her in his car and drove<br />her in the wake of her sister's body.<br /><br />Until long after midnight a changing crowd lapped up against the front<br />of the garage while George Wilson rocked himself back and forth on the<br />couch inside. For a while the door of the office was open and<br />everyone who came into the garage glanced irresistibly through it.<br />Finally someone said it was a shame and closed the door. Michaelis and<br />several other men were with him--first four or five men, later two or<br />three men. Still later Michaelis had to ask the last stranger to wait<br />there fifteen minutes longer while he went back to his own place and made<br />a pot of coffee. After that he stayed there alone with Wilson until dawn.<br /><br />About three o'clock the quality of Wilson's incoherent muttering<br />changed--he grew quieter and began to talk about the yellow car. He<br />announced that he had a way of finding out whom the yellow car belonged<br />to, and then he blurted out that a couple of months ago his wife had<br />come from the city with her face bruised and her nose swollen.<br /><br />But when he heard himself say this, he flinched and began to cry "Oh,<br />my God!" again in his groaning voice. Michaelis made a clumsy attempt<br />to distract him.<br /><br />"How long have you been married, George? Come on there, try and sit<br />still a minute and answer my question. How long have you been married?"<br /><br />"Twelve years."<br /><br />"Ever had any children? Come on, George, sit still--I asked you a<br />question. Did you ever have any children?"<br /><br />The hard brown beetles kept thudding against the dull light and whenever<br />Michaelis heard a car go tearing along the road outside it sounded to him<br />like the car that hadn't stopped a few hours before. He didn't like to go<br />into the garage because the work bench was stained where the body had<br />been lying so he moved uncomfortably around the office--he knew every<br />object in it before morning--and from time to time sat down beside Wilson<br />trying to keep him more quiet.<br /><br />"Have you got a church you go to sometimes, George? Maybe even if you<br />haven't been there for a long time? Maybe I could call up the church<br />and get a priest to come over and he could talk to you, see?"<br /><br />"Don't belong to any."<br /><br />"You ought to have a church, George, for times like this. You must have<br />gone to church once. Didn't you get married in a church? Listen, George,<br />listen to me. Didn't you get married in a church?"<br /><br />"That was a long time ago."<br /><br />The effort of answering broke the rhythm of his rocking--for a moment he<br />was silent. Then the same half knowing, half bewildered look came back<br />into his faded eyes.<br /><br />"Look in the drawer there," he said, pointing at the desk.<br /><br />"Which drawer?"<br /><br />"That drawer--that one."<br /><br />Michaelis opened the drawer nearest his hand. There was nothing in it but<br />a small expensive dog leash made of leather and braided silver. It was<br />apparently new.<br /><br />"This?" he inquired, holding it up.<br /><br />Wilson stared and nodded.<br /><br />"I found it yesterday afternoon. She tried to tell me about it but I<br />knew it was something funny."<br /><br />"You mean your wife bought it?"<br /><br />"She had it wrapped in tissue paper on her bureau."<br /><br />Michaelis didn't see anything odd in that and he gave Wilson a dozen<br />reasons why his wife might have bought the dog leash. But conceivably<br />Wilson had heard some of these same explanations before, from Myrtle,<br />because he began saying "Oh, my God!" again in a whisper--his comforter<br />left several explanations in the air.<br /><br />"Then he killed her," said Wilson. His mouth dropped open suddenly.<br /><br />"Who did?"<br /><br />"I have a way of finding out."<br /><br />"You're morbid, George," said his friend. "This has been a strain to you<br />and you don't know what you're saying. You'd better try and sit quiet<br />till morning."<br /><br />"He murdered her."<br /><br />"It was an accident, George."<br /><br />Wilson shook his head. His eyes narrowed and his mouth widened slightly<br />with the ghost of a superior "Hm!"<br /><br />"I know," he said definitely, "I'm one of these trusting fellas and I<br />don't think any harm to NObody, but when I get to know a thing I know<br />it. It was the man in that car. She ran out to speak to him and he<br />wouldn't stop."<br /><br />Michaelis had seen this too but it hadn't occurred to him that there was<br />any special significance in it. He believed that Mrs. Wilson had been<br />running away from her husband, rather than trying to stop any<br />particular car.<br /><br />"How could she of been like that?"<br /><br />"She's a deep one," said Wilson, as if that answered the question.<br />"Ah-h-h----"<br /><br />He began to rock again and Michaelis stood twisting the leash in<br />his hand.<br /><br />"Maybe you got some friend that I could telephone for, George?"<br /><br />This was a forlorn hope--he was almost sure that Wilson had no friend:<br />there was not enough of him for his wife. He was glad a little later when<br />he noticed a change in the room, a blue quickening by the window, and<br />realized that dawn wasn't far off. About five o'clock it was blue enough<br />outside to snap off the light.<br /><br />Wilson's glazed eyes turned out to the ashheaps, where small grey<br />clouds took on fantastic shape and scurried here and there in the faint<br />dawn wind.<br /><br />"I spoke to her," he muttered, after a long silence. "I told her she might<br />fool me but she couldn't fool God. I took her to the window--" With an<br />effort he got up and walked to the rear window and leaned with his face<br />pressed against it, "--and I said 'God knows what you've been doing,<br />everything you've been doing. You may fool me but you can't fool God!' "<br /><br />Standing behind him Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the<br />eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg which had just emerged pale and enormous<br />from the dissolving night.<br /><br />"God sees everything," repeated Wilson.<br /><br />"That's an advertisement," Michaelis assured him. Something made him turn<br />away from the window and look back into the room. But Wilson stood there a<br />long time, his face close to the window pane, nodding into the twilight.<br /><br /><br />By six o'clock Michaelis was worn out and grateful for the sound of a<br />car stopping outside. It was one of the watchers of the night before<br />who had promised to come back so he cooked breakfast for three which<br />he and the other man ate together. Wilson was quieter now and Michaelis<br />went home to sleep; when he awoke four hours later and hurried back to the<br />garage Wilson was gone.<br /><br />His movements--he was on foot all the time--were afterward traced to Port<br />Roosevelt and then to Gad's Hill where he bought a sandwich that he<br />didn't eat and a cup of coffee. He must have been tired and walking<br />slowly for he didn't reach Gad's Hill until noon. Thus far there was<br />no difficulty in accounting for his time--there were boys who had seen a<br />man "acting sort of crazy" and motorists at whom he stared oddly from<br />the side of the road. Then for three hours he disappeared from view.<br />The police, on the strength of what he said to Michaelis, that he "had<br />a way of finding out," supposed that he spent that time going from<br />garage to garage thereabouts inquiring for a yellow car. On the other<br />hand no garage man who had seen him ever came forward--and perhaps he<br />had an easier, surer way of finding out what he wanted to know. By<br />half past two he was in West Egg where he asked someone the way to<br />Gatsby's house. So by that time he knew Gatsby's name.<br /><br /><br />At two o'clock Gatsby put on his bathing suit and left word with the<br />butler that if any one phoned word was to be brought to him at the<br />pool. He stopped at the garage for a pneumatic mattress that had amused<br />his guests during the summer, and the chauffeur helped him pump it up.<br />Then he gave instructions that the open car wasn't to be taken out<br />under any circumstances--and this was strange because the front right<br />fender needed repair.<br /><br />Gatsby shouldered the mattress and started for the pool. Once he<br />stopped and shifted it a little, and the chauffeur asked him if he<br />needed help, but he shook his head and in a moment disappeared among<br />the yellowing trees.<br /><br />No telephone message arrived but the butler went without his sleep and<br />waited for it until four o'clock--until long after there was any one to<br />give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't<br />believe it would come and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true<br />he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high<br />price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up<br />at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he<br />found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was<br />upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being<br />real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted<br />fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward<br />him through the amorphous trees.<br /><br />The chauffeur--he was one of Wolfshiem's protégés--heard the<br />shots--afterward he could only say that he hadn't thought anything much<br />about them. I drove from the station directly to Gatsby's house and my<br />rushing anxiously up the front steps was the first thing that alarmed any<br />one. But they knew then, I firmly believe. With scarcely a word said, four<br />of us, the chauffeur, butler, gardener and I, hurried down to the pool.<br /><br />There was a faint, barely perceptible movement of the water as the<br />fresh flow from one end urged its way toward the drain at the other.<br />With little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves, the laden<br />mattress moved irregularly down the pool. A small gust of wind that<br />scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental<br />course with its accidental burden. The touch of a cluster of leaves<br />revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of compass, a thin red circle<br />in the water.<br /><br />It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener<br />saw Wilson's body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was<br />complete.<br /><br /></pre><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span>Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13783659974416042562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5033984040361137541.post-41497390032373750322007-02-06T07:45:00.000-08:002007-02-06T07:47:36.537-08:00Chapter 7<pre style="font-family: verdana;">It was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights<br />in his house failed to go on one Saturday night--and, as obscurely as it<br />had begun, his career as Trimalchio was over.<br /><br />Only gradually did I become aware that the automobiles which turned<br />expectantly into his drive stayed for just a minute and then drove<br />sulkily away. Wondering if he were sick I went over to find out--an<br />unfamiliar butler with a villainous face squinted at me suspiciously<br />from the door.<br /><br />"Is Mr. Gatsby sick?"<br /><br />"Nope." After a pause he added "sir" in a dilatory, grudging way.<br /><br />"I hadn't seen him around, and I was rather worried. Tell him Mr. Carraway<br />came over."<br /><br />"Who?" he demanded rudely.<br /><br />"Carraway."<br /><br />"Carraway. All right, I'll tell him." Abruptly he slammed the door.<br /><br />My Finn informed me that Gatsby had dismissed every servant in his<br />house a week ago and replaced them with half a dozen others, who never<br />went into West Egg Village to be bribed by the tradesmen, but ordered<br />moderate supplies over the telephone. The grocery boy reported that the<br />kitchen looked like a pigsty, and the general opinion in the village was<br />that the new people weren't servants at all.<br /><br />Next day Gatsby called me on the phone.<br /><br />"Going away?" I inquired.<br /><br />"No, old sport."<br /><br />"I hear you fired all your servants."<br /><br />"I wanted somebody who wouldn't gossip. Daisy comes over quite often--in<br />the afternoons."<br /><br />So the whole caravansary had fallen in like a card house at the<br />disapproval in her eyes.<br /><br />"They're some people Wolfshiem wanted to do something for. They're all<br />brothers and sisters. They used to run a small hotel."<br /><br />"I see."<br /><br />He was calling up at Daisy's request--would I come to lunch at<br />her house tomorrow? Miss Baker would be there. Half an hour later<br />Daisy herself telephoned and seemed relieved to find that I was coming.<br />Something was up. And yet I couldn't believe that they would choose<br />this occasion for a scene--especially for the rather harrowing scene<br />that Gatsby had outlined in the garden.<br /><br />The next day was broiling, almost the last, certainly the warmest, of<br />the summer. As my train emerged from the tunnel into sunlight, only the<br />hot whistles of the National Biscuit Company broke the simmering hush<br />at noon. The straw seats of the car hovered on the edge of combustion;<br />the woman next to me perspired delicately for a while into her white<br />shirtwaist, and then, as her newspaper dampened under her fingers,<br />lapsed despairingly into deep heat with a desolate cry. Her pocket-book<br />slapped to the floor.<br /><br />"Oh, my!" she gasped.<br /><br />I picked it up with a weary bend and handed it back to her, holding it<br />at arm's length and by the extreme tip of the corners to indicate that<br />I had no designs upon it--but every one near by, including the woman,<br />suspected me just the same.<br /><br />"Hot!" said the conductor to familiar faces. "Some weather! Hot! Hot! Hot!<br />Is it hot enough for you? Is it hot? Is it . . . ?"<br /><br />My commutation ticket came back to me with a dark stain from his hand.<br />That any one should care in this heat whose flushed lips he kissed,<br />whose head made damp the pajama pocket over his heart!<br /><br />. . . Through the hall of the Buchanans' house blew a faint wind,<br />carrying the sound of the telephone bell out to Gatsby and me as we<br />waited at the door.<br /><br />"The master's body!" roared the butler into the mouthpiece. "I'm sorry,<br />madame, but we can't furnish it--it's far too hot to touch this noon!"<br /><br />What he really said was: "Yes . . . yes . . . I'll see."<br /><br />He set down the receiver and came toward us, glistening slightly, to take<br />our stiff straw hats.<br /><br />"Madame expects you in the salon!" he cried, needlessly indicating the<br />direction. In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the<br />common store of life.<br /><br />The room, shadowed well with awnings, was dark and cool. Daisy and<br />Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols, weighing down<br />their own white dresses against the singing breeze of the fans.<br /><br />"We can't move," they said together.<br /><br />Jordan's fingers, powdered white over their tan, rested for a moment in<br />mine.<br /><br />"And Mr. Thomas Buchanan, the athlete?" I inquired.<br /><br />Simultaneously I heard his voice, gruff, muffled, husky, at the hall<br />telephone.<br /><br />Gatsby stood in the center of the crimson carpet and gazed around with<br />fascinated eyes. Daisy watched him and laughed, her sweet, exciting<br />laugh; a tiny gust of powder rose from her bosom into the air.<br /><br />"The rumor is," whispered Jordan, "that that's Tom's girl on the<br />telephone."<br /><br />We were silent. The voice in the hall rose high with annoyance.<br />"Very well, then, I won't sell you the car at all. . . . I'm<br />under no obligations to you at all. . . . And as for your bothering me<br />about it at lunch time I won't stand that at all!"<br /><br />"Holding down the receiver," said Daisy cynically.<br /><br />"No, he's not," I assured her. "It's a bona fide deal. I happen to<br />know about it."<br /><br />Tom flung open the door, blocked out its space for a moment with his<br />thick body, and hurried into the room.<br /><br />"Mr. Gatsby!" He put out his broad, flat hand with well-concealed<br />dislike. "I'm glad to see you, sir. . . . Nick. . . ."<br /><br />"Make us a cold drink," cried Daisy.<br /><br />As he left the room again she got up and went over to Gatsby and pulled<br />his face down kissing him on the mouth.<br /><br />"You know I love you," she murmured.<br /><br />"You forget there's a lady present," said Jordan.<br /><br />Daisy looked around doubtfully.<br /><br />"You kiss Nick too."<br /><br />"What a low, vulgar girl!"<br /><br />"I don't care!" cried Daisy and began to clog on the brick fireplace.<br />Then she remembered the heat and sat down guiltily on the couch just as<br />a freshly laundered nurse leading a little girl came into the room.<br /><br />"Bles-sed pre-cious," she crooned, holding out her arms. "Come to your<br />own mother that loves you."<br /><br />The child, relinquished by the nurse, rushed across the room and rooted<br />shyly into her mother's dress.<br /><br />"The Bles-sed pre-cious! Did mother get powder on your old yellowy<br />hair? Stand up now, and say How-de-do."<br /><br />Gatsby and I in turn leaned down and took the small reluctant hand.<br />Afterward he kept looking at the child with surprise. I don't think he had<br />ever really believed in its existence before.<br /><br />"I got dressed before luncheon," said the child, turning eagerly to<br />Daisy.<br /><br />"That's because your mother wanted to show you off." Her face bent into<br />the single wrinkle of the small white neck. "You dream, you. You absolute<br />little dream."<br /><br />"Yes," admitted the child calmly. "Aunt Jordan's got on a white<br />dress too."<br /><br />"How do you like mother's friends?" Daisy turned her around so that she<br />faced Gatsby. "Do you think they're pretty?"<br /><br />"Where's Daddy?"<br /><br />"She doesn't look like her father," explained Daisy. "She looks like me.<br />She's got my hair and shape of the face."<br /><br />Daisy sat back upon the couch. The nurse took a step forward and held<br />out her hand.<br /><br />"Come, Pammy."<br /><br />"Goodbye, sweetheart!"<br /><br />With a reluctant backward glance the well-disciplined child held to her<br />nurse's hand and was pulled out the door, just as Tom came back,<br />preceding four gin rickeys that clicked full of ice.<br /><br />Gatsby took up his drink.<br /><br />"They certainly look cool," he said, with visible tension.<br /><br />We drank in long greedy swallows.<br /><br />"I read somewhere that the sun's getting hotter every year," said Tom<br />genially. "It seems that pretty soon the earth's going to fall into the<br />sun--or wait a minute--it's just the opposite--the sun's getting colder<br />every year.<br /><br />"Come outside," he suggested to Gatsby, "I'd like you to have a look at<br />the place."<br /><br />I went with them out to the veranda. On the green Sound, stagnant in the<br />heat, one small sail crawled slowly toward the fresher sea. Gatsby's eyes<br />followed it momentarily; he raised his hand and pointed across the bay.<br /><br />"I'm right across from you."<br /><br />"So you are."<br /><br />Our eyes lifted over the rosebeds and the hot lawn and the weedy refuse<br />of the dog days along shore. Slowly the white wings of the boat moved<br />against the blue cool limit of the sky. Ahead lay the scalloped ocean and<br />the abounding blessed isles.<br /><br />"There's sport for you," said Tom, nodding. "I'd like to be out there<br />with him for about an hour."<br /><br />We had luncheon in the dining-room, darkened, too, against the heat,<br />and drank down nervous gayety with the cold ale.<br /><br />"What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon," cried Daisy, "and the<br />day after that, and the next thirty years?"<br /><br />"Don't be morbid," Jordan said. "Life starts all over again when it gets<br />crisp in the fall."<br /><br />"But it's so hot," insisted Daisy, on the verge of tears, "And<br />everything's so confused. Let's all go to town!"<br /><br />Her voice struggled on through the heat, beating against it, moulding its<br />senselessness into forms.<br /><br />"I've heard of making a garage out of a stable," Tom was saying to<br />Gatsby, "but I'm the first man who ever made a stable out of a garage."<br /><br />"Who wants to go to town?" demanded Daisy insistently. Gatsby's eyes<br />floated toward her. "Ah," she cried, "you look so cool."<br /><br />Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space.<br />With an effort she glanced down at the table.<br /><br />"You always look so cool," she repeated.<br /><br />She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw. He was<br />astounded. His mouth opened a little and he looked at Gatsby and then<br />back at Daisy as if he had just recognized her as some one he knew a<br />long time ago.<br /><br />"You resemble the advertisement of the man," she went on innocently.<br />"You know the advertisement of the man----"<br /><br />"All right," broke in Tom quickly, "I'm perfectly willing to go to<br />town. Come on--we're all going to town."<br /><br />He got up, his eyes still flashing between Gatsby and his wife.<br />No one moved.<br /><br />"Come on!" His temper cracked a little. "What's the matter, anyhow?<br />If we're going to town let's start."<br /><br />His hand, trembling with his effort at self control, bore to his lips the<br />last of his glass of ale. Daisy's voice got us to our feet and out on<br />to the blazing gravel drive.<br /><br />"Are we just going to go?" she objected. "Like this? Aren't we going to<br />let any one smoke a cigarette first?"<br /><br />"Everybody smoked all through lunch."<br /><br />"Oh, let's have fun," she begged him. "It's too hot to fuss."<br /><br />He didn't answer.<br /><br />"Have it your own way," she said. "Come on, Jordan."<br /><br />They went upstairs to get ready while we three men stood there shuffling<br />the hot pebbles with our feet. A silver curve of the moon hovered already<br />in the western sky. Gatsby started to speak, changed his mind, but not<br />before Tom wheeled and faced him expectantly.<br /><br />"Have you got your stables here?" asked Gatsby with an effort.<br /><br />"About a quarter of a mile down the road."<br /><br />"Oh."<br /><br />A pause.<br /><br />"I don't see the idea of going to town," broke out Tom savagely.<br />"Women get these notions in their heads----"<br /><br />"Shall we take anything to drink?" called Daisy from an upper window.<br /><br />"I'll get some whiskey," answered Tom. He went inside.<br /><br />Gatsby turned to me rigidly:<br /><br />"I can't say anything in his house, old sport."<br /><br />"She's got an indiscreet voice," I remarked. "It's full of----"<br /><br />I hesitated.<br /><br />"Her voice is full of money," he said suddenly.<br /><br />That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money--that was<br />the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the<br />cymbals' song of it. . . . High in a white palace the king's daughter,<br />the golden girl. . . .<br /><br />Tom came out of the house wrapping a quart bottle in a towel, followed<br />by Daisy and Jordan wearing small tight hats of metallic cloth and<br />carrying light capes over their arms.<br /><br />"Shall we all go in my car?" suggested Gatsby. He felt the hot, green<br />leather of the seat. "I ought to have left it in the shade."<br /><br />"Is it standard shift?" demanded Tom.<br /><br />"Yes."<br /><br />"Well, you take my coupé and let me drive your car to town."<br /><br />The suggestion was distasteful to Gatsby.<br /><br />"I don't think there's much gas," he objected.<br /><br />"Plenty of gas," said Tom boisterously. He looked at the gauge.<br />"And if it runs out I can stop at a drug store. You can buy anything at a<br />drug store nowadays."<br /><br />A pause followed this apparently pointless remark. Daisy looked at Tom<br />frowning and an indefinable expression, at once definitely unfamiliar<br />and vaguely recognizable, as if I had only heard it described in words,<br />passed over Gatsby's face.<br /><br />"Come on, Daisy," said Tom, pressing her with his hand toward Gatsby's<br />car. "I'll take you in this circus wagon."<br /><br />He opened the door but she moved out from the circle of his arm.<br /><br />"You take Nick and Jordan. We'll follow you in the coupé."<br /><br />She walked close to Gatsby, touching his coat with her hand. Jordan and<br />Tom and I got into the front seat of Gatsby's car, Tom pushed the<br />unfamiliar gears tentatively and we shot off into the oppressive heat<br />leaving them out of sight behind.<br /><br />"Did you see that?" demanded Tom.<br /><br />"See what?"<br /><br />He looked at me keenly, realizing that Jordan and I must have known all<br />along.<br /><br />"You think I'm pretty dumb, don't you?" he suggested. "Perhaps I am, but<br />I have a--almost a second sight, sometimes, that tells me what to do.<br />Maybe you don't believe that, but science----"<br /><br />He paused. The immediate contingency overtook him, pulled him back from<br />the edge of the theoretical abyss.<br /><br />"I've made a small investigation of this fellow," he continued. "I could<br />have gone deeper if I'd known----"<br /><br />"Do you mean you've been to a medium?" inquired Jordan humorously.<br /><br />"What?" Confused, he stared at us as we laughed. "A medium?"<br /><br />"About Gatsby."<br /><br />"About Gatsby! No, I haven't. I said I'd been making a small<br />investigation of his past."<br /><br />"And you found he was an Oxford man," said Jordan helpfully.<br /><br />"An Oxford man!" He was incredulous. "Like hell he is! He wears a<br />pink suit."<br /><br />"Nevertheless he's an Oxford man."<br /><br />"Oxford, New Mexico," snorted Tom contemptuously, "or something like<br />that."<br /><br />"Listen, Tom. If you're such a snob, why did you invite him to lunch?"<br />demanded Jordan crossly.<br /><br />"Daisy invited him; she knew him before we were married--God knows<br />where!"<br /><br />We were all irritable now with the fading ale and, aware of it,<br />we drove for a while in silence. Then as Doctor T. J. Eckleburg's faded<br />eyes came into sight down the road, I remembered Gatsby's caution about<br />gasoline.<br /><br />"We've got enough to get us to town," said Tom.<br /><br />"But there's a garage right here," objected Jordan. "I don't want to get<br />stalled in this baking heat."<br /><br />Tom threw on both brakes impatiently and we slid to an abrupt<br />dusty stop under Wilson's sign. After a moment the proprietor emerged<br />from the interior of his establishment and gazed hollow-eyed at the car.<br /><br />"Let's have some gas!" cried Tom roughly. "What do you think we stopped<br />for--to admire the view?"<br /><br />"I'm sick," said Wilson without moving. "I been sick all day."<br /><br />"What's the matter?"<br /><br />"I'm all run down."<br /><br />"Well, shall I help myself?" Tom demanded. "You sounded well enough<br />on the phone."<br /><br />With an effort Wilson left the shade and support of the doorway and,<br />breathing hard, unscrewed the cap of the tank. In the sunlight his face<br />was green.<br /><br />"I didn't mean to interrupt your lunch," he said. "But I need money<br />pretty bad and I was wondering what you were going to do with your<br />old car."<br /><br />"How do you like this one?" inquired Tom. "I bought it last week."<br /><br />"It's a nice yellow one," said Wilson, as he strained at the handle.<br /><br />"Like to buy it?"<br /><br />"Big chance," Wilson smiled faintly. "No, but I could make some money<br />on the other."<br /><br />"What do you want money for, all of a sudden?"<br /><br />"I've been here too long. I want to get away. My wife and I want to<br />go west."<br /><br />"Your wife does!" exclaimed Tom, startled.<br /><br />"She's been talking about it for ten years." He rested for a moment<br />against the pump, shading his eyes. "And now she's going whether she wants<br />to or not. I'm going to get her away."<br /><br />The coupé flashed by us with a flurry of dust and the flash of a<br />waving hand.<br /><br />"What do I owe you?" demanded Tom harshly.<br /><br />"I just got wised up to something funny the last two days," remarked<br />Wilson. "That's why I want to get away. That's why I been bothering you<br />about the car."<br /><br />"What do I owe you?"<br /><br />"Dollar twenty."<br /><br />The relentless beating heat was beginning to confuse me and I had<br />a bad moment there before I realized that so far his suspicions<br />hadn't alighted on Tom. He had discovered that Myrtle had some<br />sort of life apart from him in another world and the shock had<br />made him physically sick. I stared at him and then at Tom, who had made<br />a parallel discovery less than an hour before--and it occurred to me<br />that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so<br />profound as the difference between the sick and the well. Wilson was so<br />sick that he looked guilty, unforgivably guilty--as if he had just got<br />some poor girl with child.<br /><br />"I'll let you have that car," said Tom. "I'll send it over tomorrow<br />afternoon."<br /><br />That locality was always vaguely disquieting, even in the broad<br />glare of afternoon, and now I turned my head as though I had been<br />warned of something behind. Over the ashheaps the giant eyes of<br />Doctor T. J. Eckleburg kept their vigil but I perceived, after<br />a moment, that other eyes were regarding us with peculiar intensity<br />from less than twenty feet away.<br /><br />In one of the windows over the garage the curtains had been moved aside<br />a little and Myrtle Wilson was peering down at the car. So engrossed<br />was she that she had no consciousness of being observed and one<br />emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly<br />developing picture. Her expression was curiously familiar--it was an<br />expression I had often seen on women's faces but on Myrtle Wilson's<br />face it seemed purposeless and inexplicable until I realized that her<br />eyes, wide with jealous terror, were fixed not on Tom, but on Jordan<br />Baker, whom she took to be his wife.<br /><br /><br />There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind, and as we<br />drove away Tom was feeling the hot whips of panic. His wife and his<br />mistress, until an hour ago secure and inviolate, were slipping<br />precipitately from his control. Instinct made him step on the<br />accelerator with the double purpose of overtaking Daisy and leaving<br />Wilson behind, and we sped along toward Astoria at fifty miles an hour,<br />until, among the spidery girders of the elevated, we came in sight of<br />the easygoing blue coupé.<br /><br />"Those big movies around Fiftieth Street are cool," suggested Jordan.<br />"I love New York on summer afternoons when every one's away. There's<br />something very sensuous about it--overripe, as if all sorts of funny<br />fruits were going to fall into your hands."<br /><br />The word "sensuous" had the effect of further disquieting Tom but before<br />he could invent a protest the coupé came to a stop and Daisy signalled us<br />to draw up alongside.<br /><br />"Where are we going?" she cried.<br /><br />"How about the movies?"<br /><br />"It's so hot," she complained. "You go. We'll ride around and meet you<br />after." With an effort her wit rose faintly, "We'll meet you on some<br />corner. I'll be the man smoking two cigarettes."<br /><br />"We can't argue about it here," Tom said impatiently as a truck gave<br />out a cursing whistle behind us. "You follow me to the south side of<br />Central Park, in front of the Plaza."<br /><br />Several times he turned his head and looked back for their car,<br />and if the traffic delayed them he slowed up until they came into<br />sight. I think he was afraid they would dart down a side street and out<br />of his life forever.<br /><br />But they didn't. And we all took the less explicable step of engaging<br />the parlor of a suite in the Plaza Hotel.<br /><br />The prolonged and tumultuous argument that ended by herding us into<br />that room eludes me, though I have a sharp physical memory that, in the<br />course of it, my underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around my<br />legs and intermittent beads of sweat raced cool across my back. The<br />notion originated with Daisy's suggestion that we hire five bathrooms<br />and take cold baths, and then assumed more tangible form as "a place to<br />have a mint julep." Each of us said over and over that it was a "crazy<br />idea"--we all talked at once to a baffled clerk and thought, or<br />pretended to think, that we were being very funny. . . .<br /><br />The room was large and stifling, and, though it was already four<br />o'clock, opening the windows admitted only a gust of hot shrubbery from<br />the Park. Daisy went to the mirror and stood with her back to us,<br />fixing her hair.<br /><br />"It's a swell suite," whispered Jordan respectfully and every one<br />laughed.<br /><br />"Open another window," commanded Daisy, without turning around.<br /><br />"There aren't any more."<br /><br />"Well, we'd better telephone for an axe----"<br /><br />"The thing to do is to forget about the heat," said Tom impatiently.<br />"You make it ten times worse by crabbing about it."<br /><br />He unrolled the bottle of whiskey from the towel and put it on the table.<br /><br />"Why not let her alone, old sport?" remarked Gatsby. "You're the one that<br />wanted to come to town."<br /><br />There was a moment of silence. The telephone book slipped from its nail<br />and splashed to the floor, whereupon Jordan whispered "Excuse me"--but<br />this time no one laughed.<br /><br />"I'll pick it up," I offered.<br /><br />"I've got it." Gatsby examined the parted string, muttered "Hum!" in an<br />interested way, and tossed the book on a chair.<br /><br />"That's a great expression of yours, isn't it?" said Tom sharply.<br /><br />"What is?"<br /><br />"All this 'old sport' business. Where'd you pick that up?"<br /><br />"Now see here, Tom," said Daisy, turning around from the mirror, "if<br />you're going to make personal remarks I won't stay here a minute. Call<br />up and order some ice for the mint julep."<br /><br />As Tom took up the receiver the compressed heat exploded into sound and<br />we were listening to the portentous chords of Mendelssohn's Wedding March<br />from the ballroom below.<br /><br />"Imagine marrying anybody in this heat!" cried Jordan dismally.<br /><br />"Still--I was married in the middle of June," Daisy remembered,<br />"Louisville in June! Somebody fainted. Who was it fainted, Tom?"<br /><br />"Biloxi," he answered shortly.<br /><br />"A man named Biloxi. 'Blocks' Biloxi, and he made boxes--that's a<br />fact--and he was from Biloxi, Tennessee."<br /><br />"They carried him into my house," appended Jordan, "because we lived<br />just two doors from the church. And he stayed three weeks, until Daddy<br />told him he had to get out. The day after he left Daddy died." After a<br />moment she added as if she might have sounded irreverent, "There<br />wasn't any connection."<br /><br />"I used to know a Bill Biloxi from Memphis," I remarked.<br /><br />"That was his cousin. I knew his whole family history before he left.<br />He gave me an aluminum putter that I use today."<br /><br />The music had died down as the ceremony began and now a long cheer floated<br />in at the window, followed by intermittent cries of "Yea--ea--ea!"<br />and finally by a burst of jazz as the dancing began.<br /><br />"We're getting old," said Daisy. "If we were young we'd rise and dance."<br /><br />"Remember Biloxi," Jordan warned her. "Where'd you know him, Tom?"<br /><br />"Biloxi?" He concentrated with an effort. "I didn't know him. He was a<br />friend of Daisy's."<br /><br />"He was not," she denied. "I'd never seen him before. He came down in<br />the private car."<br /><br />"Well, he said he knew you. He said he was raised in Louisville.<br />Asa Bird brought him around at the last minute and asked if we had room<br />for him."<br /><br />Jordan smiled.<br /><br />"He was probably bumming his way home. He told me he was president of<br />your class at Yale."<br /><br />Tom and I looked at each other blankly.<br /><br />"BilOxi?"<br /><br />"First place, we didn't have any president----"<br /><br />Gatsby's foot beat a short, restless tattoo and Tom eyed him suddenly.<br /><br />"By the way, Mr. Gatsby, I understand you're an Oxford man."<br /><br />"Not exactly."<br /><br />"Oh, yes, I understand you went to Oxford."<br /><br />"Yes--I went there."<br /><br />A pause. Then Tom's voice, incredulous and insulting:<br /><br />"You must have gone there about the time Biloxi went to New Haven."<br /><br />Another pause. A waiter knocked and came in with crushed mint and ice but<br />the silence was unbroken by his "Thank you" and the soft closing of the<br />door. This tremendous detail was to be cleared up at last.<br /><br />"I told you I went there," said Gatsby.<br /><br />"I heard you, but I'd like to know when."<br /><br />"It was in nineteen-nineteen, I only stayed five months. That's why I<br />can't really call myself an Oxford man."<br /><br />Tom glanced around to see if we mirrored his unbelief. But we were all<br />looking at Gatsby.<br /><br />"It was an opportunity they gave to some of the officers after the<br />Armistice," he continued. "We could go to any of the universities in<br />England or France."<br /><br />I wanted to get up and slap him on the back. I had one of those renewals<br />of complete faith in him that I'd experienced before.<br /><br />Daisy rose, smiling faintly, and went to the table.<br /><br />"Open the whiskey, Tom," she ordered. "And I'll make you a mint julep.<br />Then you won't seem so stupid to yourself. . . . Look at the mint!"<br /><br />"Wait a minute," snapped Tom, "I want to ask Mr. Gatsby one more<br />question."<br /><br />"Go on," Gatsby said politely.<br /><br />"What kind of a row are you trying to cause in my house anyhow?"<br /><br />They were out in the open at last and Gatsby was content.<br /><br />"He isn't causing a row." Daisy looked desperately from one to the<br />other. "You're causing a row. Please have a little self control."<br /><br />"Self control!" repeated Tom incredulously. "I suppose the latest thing<br />is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.<br />Well, if that's the idea you can count me out. . . . Nowadays people begin<br />by sneering at family life and family institutions and next they'll<br />throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black<br />and white."<br /><br />Flushed with his impassioned gibberish he saw himself standing alone on<br />the last barrier of civilization.<br /><br />"We're all white here," murmured Jordan.<br /><br />"I know I'm not very popular. I don't give big parties. I suppose<br />you've got to make your house into a pigsty in order to have any<br />friends--in the modern world."<br /><br />Angry as I was, as we all were, I was tempted to laugh whenever he opened<br />his mouth. The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.<br /><br />"I've got something to tell YOU, old sport,----" began Gatsby. But Daisy<br />guessed at his intention.<br /><br />"Please don't!" she interrupted helplessly. "Please let's all go home.<br />Why don't we all go home?"<br /><br />"That's a good idea." I got up. "Come on, Tom. Nobody wants a drink."<br /><br />"I want to know what Mr. Gatsby has to tell me."<br /><br />"Your wife doesn't love you," said Gatsby. "She's never loved you.<br />She loves me."<br /><br />"You must be crazy!" exclaimed Tom automatically.<br /><br />Gatsby sprang to his feet, vivid with excitement.<br /><br />"She never loved you, do you hear?" he cried. "She only married you<br />because I was poor and she was tired of waiting for me. It was a terrible<br />mistake, but in her heart she never loved any one except me!"<br /><br />At this point Jordan and I tried to go but Tom and Gatsby insisted with<br />competitive firmness that we remain--as though neither of them had<br />anything to conceal and it would be a privilege to partake vicariously<br />of their emotions.<br /><br />"Sit down Daisy." Tom's voice groped unsuccessfully for the paternal<br />note. "What's been going on? I want to hear all about it."<br /><br />"I told you what's been going on," said Gatsby. "Going on for five<br />years--and you didn't know."<br /><br />Tom turned to Daisy sharply.<br /><br />"You've been seeing this fellow for five years?"<br /><br />"Not seeing," said Gatsby. "No, we couldn't meet. But both of us loved<br />each other all that time, old sport, and you didn't know. I used to laugh<br />sometimes--"but there was no laughter in his eyes, "to think that you<br />didn't know."<br /><br />"Oh--that's all." Tom tapped his thick fingers together like a clergyman<br />and leaned back in his chair.<br /><br />"You're crazy!" he exploded. "I can't speak about what happened five years<br />ago, because I didn't know Daisy then--and I'll be damned if I see how you<br />got within a mile of her unless you brought the groceries to the back<br />door. But all the rest of that's a God Damned lie. Daisy loved me when<br />she married me and she loves me now."<br /><br />"No," said Gatsby, shaking his head.<br /><br />"She does, though. The trouble is that sometimes she gets foolish ideas<br />in her head and doesn't know what she's doing." He nodded sagely. "And<br />what's more, I love Daisy too. Once in a while I go off on a spree<br />and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I<br />love her all the time."<br /><br />"You're revolting," said Daisy. She turned to me, and her voice,<br />dropping an octave lower, filled the room with thrilling scorn: "Do you<br />know why we left Chicago? I'm surprised that they didn't treat you to<br />the story of that little spree."<br /><br />Gatsby walked over and stood beside her.<br /><br />"Daisy, that's all over now," he said earnestly. "It doesn't matter any<br />more. Just tell him the truth--that you never loved him--and it's all<br />wiped out forever."<br /><br />She looked at him blindly. "Why,--how could I love him--possibly?"<br /><br />"You never loved him."<br /><br />She hesitated. Her eyes fell on Jordan and me with a sort of appeal,<br />as though she realized at last what she was doing--and as though she had<br />never, all along, intended doing anything at all. But it was done now.<br />It was too late.<br /><br />"I never loved him," she said, with perceptible reluctance.<br /><br />"Not at Kapiolani?" demanded Tom suddenly.<br /><br />"No."<br /><br />From the ballroom beneath, muffled and suffocating chords were drifting up<br />on hot waves of air.<br /><br />"Not that day I carried you down from the Punch Bowl to keep your shoes<br />dry?" There was a husky tenderness in his tone. ". . . Daisy?"<br /><br />"Please don't." Her voice was cold, but the rancour was gone from it.<br />She looked at Gatsby. "There, Jay," she said--but her hand as she tried<br />to light a cigarette was trembling. Suddenly she threw the cigarette and<br />the burning match on the carpet.<br /><br />"Oh, you want too much!" she cried to Gatsby. "I love you now--isn't that<br />enough? I can't help what's past." She began to sob helplessly.<br />"I did love him once--but I loved you too."<br /><br />Gatsby's eyes opened and closed.<br /><br />"You loved me TOO?" he repeated.<br /><br />"Even that's a lie," said Tom savagely. "She didn't know you were alive.<br />Why,--there're things between Daisy and me that you'll never know,<br />things that neither of us can ever forget."<br /><br />The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.<br /><br />"I want to speak to Daisy alone," he insisted. "She's all excited now----"<br /><br />"Even alone I can't say I never loved Tom," she admitted in a pitiful<br />voice. "It wouldn't be true."<br /><br />"Of course it wouldn't," agreed Tom.<br /><br />She turned to her husband.<br /><br />"As if it mattered to you," she said.<br /><br />"Of course it matters. I'm going to take better care of you from now on."<br /><br />"You don't understand," said Gatsby, with a touch of panic. "You're not<br />going to take care of her any more."<br /><br />"I'm not?" Tom opened his eyes wide and laughed. He could afford to<br />control himself now. "Why's that?"<br /><br />"Daisy's leaving you."<br /><br />"Nonsense."<br /><br />"I am, though," she said with a visible effort.<br /><br />"She's not leaving me!" Tom's words suddenly leaned down over Gatsby.<br />"Certainly not for a common swindler who'd have to steal the ring he<br />put on her finger."<br /><br />"I won't stand this!" cried Daisy. "Oh, please let's get out."<br /><br />"Who are you, anyhow?" broke out Tom. "You're one of that bunch that<br />hangs around with Meyer Wolfshiem--that much I happen to know. I've made<br />a little investigation into your affairs--and I'll carry it further<br />tomorrow."<br /><br />"You can suit yourself about that, old sport." said Gatsby steadily.<br /><br />"I found out what your 'drug stores' were." He turned to us and spoke<br />rapidly. "He and this Wolfshiem bought up a lot of side-street drug stores<br />here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter. That's one of<br />his little stunts. I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw<br />him and I wasn't far wrong."<br /><br />"What about it?" said Gatsby politely. "I guess your friend Walter Chase<br />wasn't too proud to come in on it."<br /><br />"And you left him in the lurch, didn't you? You let him go to jail for<br />a month over in New Jersey. God! You ought to hear Walter on the subject<br />of YOU."<br /><br />"He came to us dead broke. He was very glad to pick up some money, old<br />sport."<br /><br />"Don't you call me 'old sport'!" cried Tom. Gatsby said nothing.<br />"Walter could have you up on the betting laws too, but Wolfshiem scared<br />him into shutting his mouth."<br /><br />That unfamiliar yet recognizable look was back again in Gatsby's face.<br /><br />"That drug store business was just small change," continued Tom slowly,<br />"but you've got something on now that Walter's afraid to tell me<br />about."<br /><br />I glanced at Daisy who was staring terrified between Gatsby<br />and her husband and at Jordan who had begun to balance an invisible<br />but absorbing object on the tip of her chin. Then I turned back to<br />Gatsby--and was startled at his expression. He looked--and this is said<br />in all contempt for the babbled slander of his garden--as if he had<br />"killed a man." For a moment the set of his face could be described in<br />just that fantastic way.<br /><br />It passed, and he began to talk excitedly to Daisy, denying everything,<br />defending his name against accusations that had not been made. But with<br />every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave<br />that up and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped<br />away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling<br />unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room.<br /><br />The voice begged again to go.<br /><br />"PLEASE, Tom! I can't stand this any more."<br /><br />Her frightened eyes told that whatever intentions, whatever courage<br />she had had, were definitely gone.<br /><br />"You two start on home, Daisy," said Tom. "In Mr. Gatsby's car."<br /><br />She looked at Tom, alarmed now, but he insisted with magnanimous scorn.<br /><br />"Go on. He won't annoy you. I think he realizes that his presumptuous<br />little flirtation is over."<br /><br />They were gone, without a word, snapped out, made accidental, isolated,<br />like ghosts even from our pity.<br /><br />After a moment Tom got up and began wrapping the unopened bottle of<br />whiskey in the towel.<br /><br />"Want any of this stuff? Jordan? . . . Nick?"<br /><br />I didn't answer.<br /><br />"Nick?" He asked again.<br /><br />"What?"<br /><br />"Want any?"<br /><br />"No . . . I just remembered that today's my birthday."<br /><br />I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous menacing road of a<br />new decade.<br /><br />It was seven o'clock when we got into the coupé with him and started<br />for Long Island. Tom talked incessantly, exulting and laughing, but his<br />voice was as remote from Jordan and me as the foreign clamor on the<br />sidewalk or the tumult of the elevated overhead. Human sympathy<br />has its limits and we were content to let all their tragic arguments<br />fade with the city lights behind. Thirty--the promise of a decade<br />of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning<br />brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside<br />me who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten<br />dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face<br />fell lazily against my coat's shoulder and the formidable stroke of<br />thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.<br /><br />So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.<br /><br /><br />The young Greek, Michaelis, who ran the coffee joint beside the<br />ashheaps was the principal witness at the inquest. He had slept through<br />the heat until after five, when he strolled over to the garage and<br />found George Wilson sick in his office--really sick, pale as his own<br />pale hair and shaking all over. Michaelis advised him to go to bed but<br />Wilson refused, saying that he'd miss a lot of business if he did.<br />While his neighbor was trying to persuade him a violent racket broke<br />out overhead.<br /><br />"I've got my wife locked in up there," explained Wilson calmly.<br />"She's going to stay there till the day after tomorrow and then we're<br />going to move away."<br /><br />Michaelis was astonished; they had been neighbors for four years and<br />Wilson had never seemed faintly capable of such a statement. Generally<br />he was one of these worn-out men: when he wasn't working he sat on a<br />chair in the doorway and stared at the people and the cars that passed<br />along the road. When any one spoke to him he invariably laughed in an<br />agreeable, colorless way. He was his wife's man and not his own.<br /><br />So naturally Michaelis tried to find out what had happened, but Wilson<br />wouldn't say a word--instead he began to throw curious, suspicious<br />glances at his visitor and ask him what he'd been doing at certain<br />times on certain days. Just as the latter was getting uneasy some<br />workmen came past the door bound for his restaurant and Michaelis took<br />the opportunity to get away, intending to come back later. But he didn't.<br />He supposed he forgot to, that's all. When he came outside again<br />a little after seven he was reminded of the conversation because he<br />heard Mrs. Wilson's voice, loud and scolding, downstairs in the garage.<br /><br />"Beat me!" he heard her cry. "Throw me down and beat me, you dirty<br />little coward!"<br /><br />A moment later she rushed out into the dusk, waving her hands and<br />shouting; before he could move from his door the business was over.<br /><br />The "death car" as the newspapers called it, didn't stop; it came out<br />of the gathering darkness, wavered tragically for a moment and then<br />disappeared around the next bend. Michaelis wasn't even sure of its<br />color--he told the first policeman that it was light green. The other<br />car, the one going toward New York, came to rest a hundred yards<br />beyond, and its driver hurried back to where Myrtle Wilson, her life<br />violently extinguished, knelt in the road and mingled her thick, dark<br />blood with the dust.<br /><br />Michaelis and this man reached her first but when they had torn open<br />her shirtwaist still damp with perspiration, they saw that her left<br />breast was swinging loose like a flap and there was no need to listen<br />for the heart beneath. The mouth was wide open and ripped at the<br />corners as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous<br />vitality she had stored so long.<br /><br /><br />We saw the three or four automobiles and the crowd when we were still<br />some distance away.<br /><br />"Wreck!" said Tom. "That's good. Wilson'll have a little business<br />at last."<br /><br />He slowed down, but still without any intention of stopping until,<br />as we came nearer, the hushed intent faces of the people at the garage<br />door made him automatically put on the brakes.<br /><br />"We'll take a look," he said doubtfully, "just a look."<br /><br />I became aware now of a hollow, wailing sound which issued incessantly<br />from the garage, a sound which as we got out of the coupé and walked<br />toward the door resolved itself into the words "Oh, my God!" uttered over<br />and over in a gasping moan.<br /><br />"There's some bad trouble here," said Tom excitedly.<br /><br />He reached up on tiptoes and peered over a circle of heads into the<br />garage which was lit only by a yellow light in a swinging wire basket<br />overhead. Then he made a harsh sound in his throat and with a violent<br />thrusting movement of his powerful arms pushed his way through.<br /><br />The circle closed up again with a running murmur of expostulation; it<br />was a minute before I could see anything at all. Then new arrivals<br />disarranged the line and Jordan and I were pushed suddenly inside.<br /><br />Myrtle Wilson's body wrapped in a blanket and then in another<br />blanket as though she suffered from a chill in the hot night lay on a<br />work table by the wall and Tom, with his back to us, was bending over<br />it, motionless. Next to him stood a motorcycle policeman taking down<br />names with much sweat and correction in a little book. At first I<br />couldn't find the source of the high, groaning words that echoed<br />clamorously through the bare garage--then I saw Wilson standing on the<br />raised threshold of his office, swaying back and forth and holding to<br />the doorposts with both hands. Some man was talking to him in a low<br />voice and attempting from time to time to lay a hand on his shoulder,<br />but Wilson neither heard nor saw. His eyes would drop slowly from the<br />swinging light to the laden table by the wall and then jerk back to<br />the light again and he gave out incessantly his high horrible call.<br /><br />"O, my Ga-od! O, my Ga-od! Oh, Ga-od! Oh, my Ga-od!"<br /><br />Presently Tom lifted his head with a jerk and after staring around the<br />garage with glazed eyes addressed a mumbled incoherent remark to the<br />policeman.<br /><br />"M-a-v--" the policeman was saying, "--o----"<br /><br />"No,--r--" corrected the man, "M-a-v-r-o----"<br /><br />"Listen to me!" muttered Tom fiercely.<br /><br />"r--" said the policeman, "o----"<br /><br />"g----"<br /><br />"g--" He looked up as Tom's broad hand fell sharply on his shoulder.<br />"What you want, fella?"<br /><br />"What happened--that's what I want to know!"<br /><br />"Auto hit her. Ins'antly killed."<br /><br />"Instantly killed," repeated Tom, staring.<br /><br />"She ran out ina road. Son-of-a-bitch didn't even stopus car."<br /><br />"There was two cars," said Michaelis, "one comin', one goin', see?"<br /><br />"Going where?" asked the policeman keenly.<br /><br />"One goin' each way. Well, she--" His hand rose toward the blankets but<br />stopped half way and fell to his side, "--she ran out there an' the one<br />comin' from N'York knock right into her goin' thirty or forty miles an<br />hour."<br /><br />"What's the name of this place here?" demanded the officer.<br /><br />"Hasn't got any name."<br /><br />A pale, well-dressed Negro stepped near.<br /><br />"It was a yellow car," he said, "big yellow car. New."<br /><br />"See the accident?" asked the policeman.<br /><br />"No, but the car passed me down the road, going faster'n forty. Going<br />fifty, sixty."<br /><br />"Come here and let's have your name. Look out now. I want to get his<br />name."<br /><br />Some words of this conversation must have reached Wilson swaying<br />in the office door, for suddenly a new theme found voice among<br />his gasping cries.<br /><br />"You don't have to tell me what kind of car it was! I know what kind of<br />car it was!"<br /><br />Watching Tom I saw the wad of muscle back of his shoulder tighten<br />under his coat. He walked quickly over to Wilson and standing<br />in front of him seized him firmly by the upper arms.<br /><br />"You've got to pull yourself together," he said with soothing<br />gruffness.<br /><br />Wilson's eyes fell upon Tom; he started up on his tiptoes and then<br />would have collapsed to his knees had not Tom held him upright.<br /><br />"Listen," said Tom, shaking him a little. "I just got here a minute ago,<br />from New York. I was bringing you that coupé we've been talking about.<br />That yellow car I was driving this afternoon wasn't mine, do you hear? I<br />haven't seen it all afternoon."<br /><br />Only the Negro and I were near enough to hear what he said but the<br />policeman caught something in the tone and looked over with truculent<br />eyes.<br /><br />"What's all that?" he demanded.<br /><br />"I'm a friend of his." Tom turned his head but kept his hands firm on<br />Wilson's body. "He says he knows the car that did it. . . . It was a yellow<br />car."<br /><br />Some dim impulse moved the policeman to look suspiciously at Tom.<br /><br />"And what color's your car?"<br /><br />"It's a blue car, a coupé."<br /><br />"We've come straight from New York," I said.<br /><br />Some one who had been driving a little behind us confirmed this and<br />the policeman turned away.<br /><br />"Now, if you'll let me have that name again correct----"<br /><br />Picking up Wilson like a doll Tom carried him into the office,<br />set him down in a chair and came back.<br /><br />"If somebody'll come here and sit with him!" he snapped<br />authoritatively. He watched while the two men standing closest glanced<br />at each other and went unwillingly into the room. Then Tom shut the<br />door on them and came down the single step, his eyes avoiding the<br />table. As he passed close to me he whispered "Let's get out."<br /><br />Self consciously, with his authoritative arms breaking the way, we<br />pushed through the still gathering crowd, passing a hurried doctor,<br />case in hand, who had been sent for in wild hope half an hour ago.<br /><br />Tom drove slowly until we were beyond the bend--then his foot came down<br />hard and the coupé raced along through the night. In a little while I<br />heard a low husky sob and saw that the tears were overflowing down his<br />face.<br /><br />"The God Damn coward!" he whimpered. "He didn't even stop his car."<br /><br /><br />The Buchanans' house floated suddenly toward us through the dark rustling<br />trees. Tom stopped beside the porch and looked up at the second floor<br />where two windows bloomed with light among the vines.<br /><br />"Daisy's home," he said. As we got out of the car he glanced at me and<br />frowned slightly.<br /><br />"I ought to have dropped you in West Egg, Nick. There's nothing we can<br />do tonight."<br /><br />A change had come over him and he spoke gravely, and with decision.<br />As we walked across the moonlight gravel to the porch he disposed of<br />the situation in a few brisk phrases.<br /><br />"I'll telephone for a taxi to take you home, and while you're waiting<br />you and Jordan better go in the kitchen and have them get you some<br />supper--if you want any." He opened the door. "Come in."<br /><br />"No thanks. But I'd be glad if you'd order me the taxi. I'll wait<br />outside."<br /><br />Jordan put her hand on my arm.<br /><br />"Won't you come in, Nick?"<br /><br />"No thanks."<br /><br />I was feeling a little sick and I wanted to be alone. But Jordan lingered<br />for a moment more.<br /><br />"It's only half past nine," she said.<br /><br />I'd be damned if I'd go in; I'd had enough of all of them for one day<br />and suddenly that included Jordan too. She must have seen something of<br />this in my expression for she turned abruptly away and ran up the<br />porch steps into the house. I sat down for a few minutes with my head<br />in my hands, until I heard the phone taken up inside and the butler's<br />voice calling a taxi. Then I walked slowly down the drive away from the<br />house intending to wait by the gate.<br /><br />I hadn't gone twenty yards when I heard my name and Gatsby stepped from<br />between two bushes into the path. I must have felt pretty weird by that<br />time because I could think of nothing except the luminosity of his<br />pink suit under the moon.<br /><br />"What are you doing?" I inquired.<br /><br />"Just standing here, old sport."<br /><br />Somehow, that seemed a despicable occupation. For all I knew he was going<br />to rob the house in a moment; I wouldn't have been surprised to see<br />sinister faces, the faces of "Wolfshiem's people," behind him in the<br />dark shrubbery.<br /><br />"Did you see any trouble on the road?" he asked after a minute.<br /><br />"Yes."<br /><br />He hesitated.<br /><br />"Was she killed?"<br /><br />"Yes."<br /><br />"I thought so; I told Daisy I thought so. It's better that the shock<br />should all come at once. She stood it pretty well."<br /><br />He spoke as if Daisy's reaction was the only thing that mattered.<br /><br />"I got to West Egg by a side road," he went on, "and left the car in my<br />garage. I don't think anybody saw us but of course I can't be sure."<br /><br />I disliked him so much by this time that I didn't find it necessary to<br />tell him he was wrong.<br /><br />"Who was the woman?" he inquired.<br /><br />"Her name was Wilson. Her husband owns the garage. How the devil did it<br />happen?"<br /><br />"Well, I tried to swing the wheel----" He broke off, and suddenly I<br />guessed at the truth.<br /><br />"Was Daisy driving?"<br /><br />"Yes," he said after a moment, "but of course I'll say I was. You see,<br />when we left New York she was very nervous and she thought it would<br />steady her to drive--and this woman rushed out at us just as we were<br />passing a car coming the other way. It all happened in a minute but it<br />seemed to me that she wanted to speak to us, thought we were somebody<br />she knew. Well, first Daisy turned away from the woman toward the other<br />car, and then she lost her nerve and turned back. The second my hand<br />reached the wheel I felt the shock--it must have killed her instantly."<br /><br />"It ripped her open----"<br /><br />"Don't tell me, old sport." He winced. "Anyhow--Daisy stepped on it.<br />I tried to make her stop, but she couldn't so I pulled on the emergency<br />brake. Then she fell over into my lap and I drove on.<br /><br />"She'll be all right tomorrow," he said presently. "I'm just going to<br />wait here and see if he tries to bother her about that unpleasantness<br />this afternoon. She's locked herself into her room and if he tries any<br />brutality she's going to turn the light out and on again."<br /><br />"He won't touch her," I said. "He's not thinking about her."<br /><br />"I don't trust him, old sport."<br /><br />"How long are you going to wait?"<br /><br />"All night if necessary. Anyhow till they all go to bed."<br /><br />A new point of view occurred to me. Suppose Tom found out that Daisy had<br />been driving. He might think he saw a connection in it--he might think<br />anything. I looked at the house: there were two or three bright windows<br />downstairs and the pink glow from Daisy's room on the second floor.<br /><br />"You wait here," I said. "I'll see if there's any sign of a commotion."<br /><br />I walked back along the border of the lawn, traversed the gravel softly<br />and tiptoed up the veranda steps. The drawing-room curtains were open,<br />and I saw that the room was empty. Crossing the porch where we had dined<br />that June night three months before I came to a small rectangle of light<br />which I guessed was the pantry window. The blind was drawn but I found<br />a rift at the sill.<br /><br />Daisy and Tom were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table<br />with a plate of cold fried chicken between them and two bottles of<br />ale. He was talking intently across the table at her and in his<br />earnestness his hand had fallen upon and covered her own. Once in a<br />while she looked up at him and nodded in agreement.<br /><br />They weren't happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the<br />ale--and yet they weren't unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air<br />of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that<br />they were conspiring together.<br /><br />As I tiptoed from the porch I heard my taxi feeling its way along the<br />dark road toward the house. Gatsby was waiting where I had left him in<br />the drive.<br /><br />"Is it all quiet up there?" he asked anxiously.<br /><br />"Yes, it's all quiet." I hesitated. "You'd better come home and get<br />some sleep."<br /><br />He shook his head.<br /><br />"I want to wait here till Daisy goes to bed. Good night, old sport."<br /><br />He put his hands in his coat pockets and turned back eagerly to his<br />scrutiny of the house, as though my presence marred the sacredness of<br />the vigil. So I walked away and left him standing there in the<br />moonlight--watching over nothing.<br /></pre><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span>Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13783659974416042562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5033984040361137541.post-82708324429761853992007-02-06T07:44:00.000-08:002007-02-06T07:45:29.853-08:00Chapter 6<pre style="font-family: verdana;">About this time an ambitious young reporter from New York arrived one<br />morning at Gatsby's door and asked him if he had anything to say.<br /><br />"Anything to say about what?" inquired Gatsby politely.<br /><br />"Why,--any statement to give out."<br /><br />It transpired after a confused five minutes that the man had heard<br />Gatsby's name around his office in a connection which he either<br />wouldn't reveal or didn't fully understand. This was his day off<br />and with laudable initiative he had hurried out "to see."<br /><br />It was a random shot, and yet the reporter's instinct was right. Gatsby's<br />notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his<br />hospitality and so become authorities on his past, had increased<br />all summer until he fell just short of being news. Contemporary<br />legends such as the "underground pipe-line to Canada" attached<br />themselves to him, and there was one persistent story that he<br />didn't live in a house at all, but in a boat that looked like a house<br />and was moved secretly up and down the Long Island shore. Just why<br />these inventions were a source of satisfaction to James Gatz of North<br />Dakota, isn't easy to say.<br /><br />James Gatz--that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had<br />changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that<br />witnessed the beginning of his career--when he saw Dan Cody's yacht drop<br />anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior. It was James Gatz<br />who had been loafing along the beach that afternoon in a torn green<br />jersey and a pair of canvas pants, but it was already Jay Gatsby who<br />borrowed a row-boat, pulled out to the TUOLOMEE and informed Cody that<br />a wind might catch him and break him up in half an hour.<br /><br />I suppose he'd had the name ready for a long time, even then. His<br />parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people--his imagination had<br />never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that<br />Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic<br />conception of himself. He was a son of God--a phrase which, if it means<br />anything, means just that--and he must be about His Father's Business,<br />the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty. So he invented<br />just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be<br />likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.<br /><br />For over a year he had been beating his way along the south shore of<br />Lake Superior as a clam digger and a salmon fisher or in any other<br />capacity that brought him food and bed. His brown, hardening body lived<br />naturally through the half fierce, half lazy work of the bracing days.<br />He knew women early and since they spoiled him he became contemptuous<br />of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of the others<br />because they were hysterical about things which in his overwhelming<br />self-absorption he took for granted.<br /><br />But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque<br />and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe<br />of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the<br />clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet<br />light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the<br />pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid<br />scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an<br />outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the<br />unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded<br />securely on a fairy's wing.<br /><br />An instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months before, to<br />the small Lutheran college of St. Olaf in southern Minnesota. He stayed<br />there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of<br />his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor's work with<br />which he was to pay his way through. Then he drifted back to Lake<br />Superior, and he was still searching for something to do on the day<br />that Dan Cody's yacht dropped anchor in the shallows along shore.<br /><br />Cody was fifty years old then, a product of the Nevada silver fields,<br />of the Yukon, of every rush for metal since Seventy-five. The<br />transactions in Montana copper that made him many times a millionaire<br />found him physically robust but on the verge of soft-mindedness, and,<br />suspecting this an infinite number of women tried to separate him from<br />his money. The none too savory ramifications by which Ella Kaye, the<br />newspaper woman, played Madame de Maintenon to his weakness and sent him<br />to sea in a yacht, were common knowledge to the turgid journalism<br />of 1902. He had been coasting along all too hospitable shores for five<br />years when he turned up as James Gatz's destiny at Little Girl Bay.<br /><br />To the young Gatz, resting on his oars and looking up at the railed<br />deck, the yacht represented all the beauty and glamor in the world. I<br />suppose he smiled at Cody--he had probably discovered that people liked<br />him when he smiled. At any rate Cody asked him a few questions (one of<br />them elicited the brand new name) and found that he was quick, and<br />extravagantly ambitious. A few days later he took him to Duluth and<br />bought him a blue coat, six pair of white duck trousers and a yachting<br />cap. And when the TUOLOMEE left for the West Indies and the Barbary<br />Coast Gatsby left too.<br /><br />He was employed in a vague personal capacity--while he remained with<br />Cody he was in turn steward, mate, skipper, secretary, and even jailor,<br />for Dan Cody sober knew what lavish doings Dan Cody drunk might soon be<br />about and he provided for such contingencies by reposing more and more<br />trust in Gatsby. The arrangement lasted five years during which the<br />boat went three times around the continent. It might have lasted<br />indefinitely except for the fact that Ella Kaye came on board one night<br />in Boston and a week later Dan Cody inhospitably died.<br /><br />I remember the portrait of him up in Gatsby's bedroom, a grey, florid<br />man with a hard empty face--the pioneer debauchee who during one phase<br />of American life brought back to the eastern seaboard the savage<br />violence of the frontier brothel and saloon. It was indirectly due to<br />Cody that Gatsby drank so little. Sometimes in the course of gay parties<br />women used to rub champagne into his hair; for himself he formed the<br />habit of letting liquor alone.<br /><br />And it was from Cody that he inherited money--a legacy of twenty-five<br />thousand dollars. He didn't get it. He never understood the legal<br />device that was used against him but what remained of the millions<br />went intact to Ella Kaye. He was left with his singularly appropriate<br />education; the vague contour of Jay Gatsby had filled out to the<br />substantiality of a man.<br /><br /><br />He told me all this very much later, but I've put it down here with the<br />idea of exploding those first wild rumors about his antecedents, which<br />weren't even faintly true. Moreover he told it to me at a time of<br />confusion, when I had reached the point of believing everything and<br />nothing about him. So I take advantage of this short halt, while<br />Gatsby, so to speak, caught his breath, to clear this set of<br />misconceptions away.<br /><br />It was a halt, too, in my association with his affairs. For<br />several weeks I didn't see him or hear his voice on the phone--mostly<br />I was in New York, trotting around with Jordan and trying to<br />ingratiate myself with her senile aunt--but finally I went over to<br />his house one Sunday afternoon. I hadn't been there two minutes when<br />somebody brought Tom Buchanan in for a drink. I was startled,<br />naturally, but the really surprising thing was that it hadn't happened<br />before.<br /><br />They were a party of three on horseback--Tom and a man named Sloane and<br />a pretty woman in a brown riding habit who had been there previously.<br /><br />"I'm delighted to see you," said Gatsby standing on his porch.<br />"I'm delighted that you dropped in."<br /><br />As though they cared!<br /><br />"Sit right down. Have a cigarette or a cigar." He walked around the room<br />quickly, ringing bells. "I'll have something to drink for you in just<br />a minute."<br /><br />He was profoundly affected by the fact that Tom was there. But he would be<br />uneasy anyhow until he had given them something, realizing in a vague<br />way that that was all they came for. Mr. Sloane wanted nothing. A<br />lemonade? No, thanks. A little champagne? Nothing at all,<br />thanks. . . . I'm sorry----<br /><br />"Did you have a nice ride?"<br /><br />"Very good roads around here."<br /><br />"I suppose the automobiles----"<br /><br />"Yeah."<br /><br />Moved by an irresistible impulse, Gatsby turned to Tom who had accepted<br />the introduction as a stranger.<br /><br />"I believe we've met somewhere before, Mr. Buchanan."<br /><br />"Oh, yes," said Tom, gruffly polite but obviously not remembering.<br />"So we did. I remember very well."<br /><br />"About two weeks ago."<br /><br />"That's right. You were with Nick here."<br /><br />"I know your wife," continued Gatsby, almost aggressively.<br /><br />"That so?"<br /><br />Tom turned to me.<br /><br />"You live near here, Nick?"<br /><br />"Next door."<br /><br />"That so?"<br /><br />Mr. Sloane didn't enter into the conversation but lounged back haughtily<br />in his chair; the woman said nothing either--until unexpectedly, after<br />two highballs, she became cordial.<br /><br />"We'll all come over to your next party, Mr. Gatsby," she suggested.<br />"What do you say?"<br /><br />"Certainly. I'd be delighted to have you."<br /><br />"Be ver' nice," said Mr. Sloane, without gratitude. "Well--think ought to<br />be starting home."<br /><br />"Please don't hurry," Gatsby urged them. He had control of himself now<br />and he wanted to see more of Tom. "Why don't you--why don't you stay for<br />supper? I wouldn't be surprised if some other people dropped in from<br />New York."<br /><br />"You come to supper with ME," said the lady enthusiastically.<br />"Both of you."<br /><br />This included me. Mr. Sloane got to his feet.<br /><br />"Come along," he said--but to her only.<br /><br />"I mean it," she insisted. "I'd love to have you. Lots of room."<br /><br />Gatsby looked at me questioningly. He wanted to go and he didn't see<br />that Mr. Sloane had determined he shouldn't.<br /><br />"I'm afraid I won't be able to," I said.<br /><br />"Well, you come," she urged, concentrating on Gatsby.<br /><br />Mr. Sloane murmured something close to her ear.<br /><br />"We won't be late if we start now," she insisted aloud.<br /><br />"I haven't got a horse," said Gatsby. "I used to ride in the army but<br />I've never bought a horse. I'll have to follow you in my car. Excuse me<br />for just a minute."<br /><br />The rest of us walked out on the porch, where Sloane and the lady began<br />an impassioned conversation aside.<br /><br />"My God, I believe the man's coming," said Tom. "Doesn't he know she<br />doesn't want him?"<br /><br />"She says she does want him."<br /><br />"She has a big dinner party and he won't know a soul there." He frowned.<br />"I wonder where in the devil he met Daisy. By God, I may be<br />old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to<br />suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish."<br /><br />Suddenly Mr. Sloane and the lady walked down the steps and mounted<br />their horses.<br /><br />"Come on," said Mr. Sloane to Tom, "we're late. We've got to go." And then<br />to me: "Tell him we couldn't wait, will you?"<br /><br />Tom and I shook hands, the rest of us exchanged a cool nod and<br />they trotted quickly down the drive, disappearing under the August<br />foliage just as Gatsby with hat and light overcoat in hand came out<br />the front door.<br /><br />Tom was evidently perturbed at Daisy's running around alone, for on the<br />following Saturday night he came with her to Gatsby's party. Perhaps<br />his presence gave the evening its peculiar quality of oppressiveness--it<br />stands out in my memory from Gatsby's other parties that summer. There<br />were the same people, or at least the same sort of people, the same<br />profusion of champagne, the same many-colored, many-keyed commotion,<br />but I felt an unpleasantness in the air, a pervading harshness that<br />hadn't been there before. Or perhaps I had merely grown used to it,<br />grown to accept West Egg as a world complete in itself, with its own<br />standards and its own great figures, second to nothing because it had<br />no consciousness of being so, and now I was looking at it again,<br />through Daisy's eyes. It is invariably saddening to look through new<br />eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of<br />adjustment.<br /><br />They arrived at twilight and as we strolled out among the sparkling<br />hundreds Daisy's voice was playing murmurous tricks in her throat.<br /><br />"These things excite me SO," she whispered. "If you want to kiss me<br />any time during the evening, Nick, just let me know and I'll be glad<br />to arrange it for you. Just mention my name. Or present a green card.<br />I'm giving out green----"<br /><br />"Look around," suggested Gatsby.<br /><br />"I'm looking around. I'm having a marvelous----"<br /><br />"You must see the faces of many people you've heard about."<br /><br />Tom's arrogant eyes roamed the crowd.<br /><br />"We don't go around very much," he said. "In fact I was just thinking<br />I don't know a soul here."<br /><br />"Perhaps you know that lady." Gatsby indicated a gorgeous, scarcely human<br />orchid of a woman who sat in state under a white plum tree. Tom and Daisy<br />stared, with that peculiarly unreal feeling that accompanies the<br />recognition of a hitherto ghostly celebrity of the movies.<br /><br />"She's lovely," said Daisy.<br /><br />"The man bending over her is her director."<br /><br />He took them ceremoniously from group to group:<br /><br />"Mrs. Buchanan . . . and Mr. Buchanan----" After an instant's hesitation<br />he added: "the polo player."<br /><br />"Oh no," objected Tom quickly, "Not me."<br /><br />But evidently the sound of it pleased Gatsby for Tom remained "the polo<br />player" for the rest of the evening.<br /><br />"I've never met so many celebrities!" Daisy exclaimed. "I liked that<br />man--what was his name?--with the sort of blue nose."<br /><br />Gatsby identified him, adding that he was a small producer.<br /><br />"Well, I liked him anyhow."<br /><br />"I'd a little rather not be the polo player," said Tom pleasantly, "I'd<br />rather look at all these famous people in--in oblivion."<br /><br />Daisy and Gatsby danced. I remember being surprised by his graceful,<br />conservative fox-trot--I had never seen him dance before. Then they<br />sauntered over to my house and sat on the steps for half an hour while<br />at her request I remained watchfully in the garden: "In case there's a<br />fire or a flood," she explained, "or any act of God."<br /><br />Tom appeared from his oblivion as we were sitting down to supper together.<br />"Do you mind if I eat with some people over here?" he said. "A fellow's<br />getting off some funny stuff."<br /><br />"Go ahead," answered Daisy genially, "And if you want to take down any<br />addresses here's my little gold pencil. . . ." She looked around after<br />a moment and told me the girl was "common but pretty," and I knew that<br />except for the half hour she'd been alone with Gatsby she wasn't having<br />a good time.<br /><br />We were at a particularly tipsy table. That was my fault--Gatsby had<br />been called to the phone and I'd enjoyed these same people only two<br />weeks before. But what had amused me then turned septic on the air now.<br /><br />"How do you feel, Miss Baedeker?"<br /><br />The girl addressed was trying, unsuccessfully, to slump against my<br />shoulder. At this inquiry she sat up and opened her eyes.<br /><br />"Wha?"<br /><br />A massive and lethargic woman, who had been urging Daisy to play golf<br />with her at the local club tomorrow, spoke in Miss Baedeker's defence:<br /><br />"Oh, she's all right now. When she's had five or six cocktails she always<br />starts screaming like that. I tell her she ought to leave it alone."<br /><br />"I do leave it alone," affirmed the accused hollowly.<br /><br />"We heard you yelling, so I said to Doc Civet here: 'There's somebody<br />that needs your help, Doc.' "<br /><br />"She's much obliged, I'm sure," said another friend, without gratitude.<br />"But you got her dress all wet when you stuck her head in the pool."<br /><br />"Anything I hate is to get my head stuck in a pool," mumbled Miss<br />Baedeker. "They almost drowned me once over in New Jersey."<br /><br />"Then you ought to leave it alone," countered Doctor Civet.<br /><br />"Speak for yourself!" cried Miss Baedeker violently. "Your hand shakes.<br />I wouldn't let you operate on me!"<br /><br />It was like that. Almost the last thing I remember was standing with<br />Daisy and watching the moving picture director and his Star. They were<br />still under the white plum tree and their faces were touching except<br />for a pale thin ray of moonlight between. It occurred to me that he<br />had been very slowly bending toward her all evening to attain this<br />proximity, and even while I watched I saw him stoop one ultimate degree<br />and kiss at her cheek.<br /><br />"I like her," said Daisy, "I think she's lovely."<br /><br />But the rest offended her--and inarguably, because it wasn't a gesture but<br />an emotion. She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented "place"<br />that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village--appalled<br />by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too<br />obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing<br />to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed<br />to understand.<br /><br />I sat on the front steps with them while they waited for their car. It<br />was dark here in front: only the bright door sent ten square feet of<br />light volleying out into the soft black morning. Sometimes a shadow<br />moved against a dressing-room blind above, gave way to another shadow,<br />an indefinite procession of shadows, who rouged and powdered in an<br />invisible glass.<br /><br />"Who is this Gatsby anyhow?" demanded Tom suddenly. "Some big bootlegger?"<br /><br />"Where'd you hear that?" I inquired.<br /><br />"I didn't hear it. I imagined it. A lot of these newly rich people are<br />just big bootleggers, you know."<br /><br />"Not Gatsby," I said shortly.<br /><br />He was silent for a moment. The pebbles of the drive crunched under his<br />feet.<br /><br />"Well, he certainly must have strained himself to get this menagerie<br />together."<br /><br />A breeze stirred the grey haze of Daisy's fur collar.<br /><br />"At least they're more interesting than the people we know," she said<br />with an effort.<br /><br />"You didn't look so interested."<br /><br />"Well, I was."<br /><br />Tom laughed and turned to me.<br /><br />"Did you notice Daisy's face when that girl asked her to put her under<br />a cold shower?"<br /><br />Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper,<br />bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had<br />before and would never have again. When the melody rose, her voice<br />broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and<br />each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.<br /><br />"Lots of people come who haven't been invited," she said suddenly.<br />"That girl hadn't been invited. They simply force their way in and he's<br />too polite to object."<br /><br />"I'd like to know who he is and what he does," insisted Tom. "And I think<br />I'll make a point of finding out."<br /><br />"I can tell you right now," she answered. "He owned some drug stores,<br />a lot of drug stores. He built them up himself."<br /><br />The dilatory limousine came rolling up the drive.<br /><br />"Good night, Nick," said Daisy.<br /><br />Her glance left me and sought the lighted top of the steps where<br />"Three o'Clock in the Morning," a neat, sad little waltz of that year,<br />was drifting out the open door. After all, in the very casualness of<br />Gatsby's party there were romantic possibilities totally absent from<br />her world. What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling<br />her back inside? What would happen now in the dim incalculable hours?<br />Perhaps some unbelievable guest would arrive, a person infinitely rare<br />and to be marvelled at, some authentically radiant young girl who with<br />one fresh glance at Gatsby, one moment of magical encounter, would blot<br />out those five years of unwavering devotion.<br /><br /><br />I stayed late that night. Gatsby asked me to wait until he was free<br />and I lingered in the garden until the inevitable swimming party had run<br />up, chilled and exalted, from the black beach, until the lights were<br />extinguished in the guest rooms overhead. When he came down the steps at<br />last the tanned skin was drawn unusually tight on his face, and his eyes<br />were bright and tired.<br /><br />"She didn't like it," he said immediately.<br /><br />"Of course she did."<br /><br />"She didn't like it," he insisted. "She didn't have a good time."<br /><br />He was silent and I guessed at his unutterable depression.<br /><br />"I feel far away from her," he said. "It's hard to make her understand."<br /><br />"You mean about the dance?"<br /><br />"The dance?" He dismissed all the dances he had given with a snap of<br />his fingers. "Old sport, the dance is unimportant."<br /><br />He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say:<br />"I never loved you." After she had obliterated three years with that<br />sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken.<br />One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back to<br />Louisville and be married from her house--just as if it were five<br />years ago.<br /><br />"And she doesn't understand," he said. "She used to be able to<br />understand. We'd sit for hours----"<br /><br />He broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rinds<br />and discarded favors and crushed flowers.<br /><br />"I wouldn't ask too much of her," I ventured. "You can't repeat the past."<br /><br />"Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!"<br /><br />He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the<br />shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.<br /><br />"I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before," he said,<br />nodding determinedly. "She'll see."<br /><br />He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover<br />something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.<br />His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could<br />once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he<br />could find out what that thing was. . . .<br /><br />. . . One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down<br />the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where<br />there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight.<br />They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night<br />with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of<br />the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the<br />darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the<br />corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really<br />formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees--he could<br />climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the<br />pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.<br /><br />His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his<br />own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his<br />unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp<br />again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer<br />to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed<br />her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the<br />incarnation was complete.<br /><br />Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was<br />reminded of something--an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that<br />I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to<br />take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though<br />there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But<br />they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was<br />uncommunicable forever.</pre><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span>Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13783659974416042562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5033984040361137541.post-29994727372676624732007-02-06T07:42:00.000-08:002007-02-06T07:43:53.541-08:00Chapter 5<pre style="font-family: verdana;">When I came home to West Egg that night I was afraid for a moment that<br />my house was on fire. Two o'clock and the whole corner of the peninsula<br />was blazing with light which fell unreal on the shrubbery and made thin<br />elongating glints upon the roadside wires. Turning a corner I saw that it<br />was Gatsby's house, lit from tower to cellar.<br /><br />At first I thought it was another party, a wild rout that had resolved<br />itself into "hide-and-go-seek" or "sardines-in-the-box" with all the<br />house thrown open to the game. But there wasn't a sound. Only wind in<br />the trees which blew the wires and made the lights go off and on again<br />as if the house had winked into the darkness. As my taxi groaned away I<br />saw Gatsby walking toward me across his lawn.<br /><br />"Your place looks like the world's fair," I said.<br /><br />"Does it?" He turned his eyes toward it absently. "I have been glancing<br />into some of the rooms. Let's go to Coney Island, old sport. In my car."<br /><br />"It's too late."<br /><br />"Well, suppose we take a plunge in the swimming pool? I haven't made use<br />of it all summer."<br /><br />"I've got to go to bed."<br /><br />"All right."<br /><br />He waited, looking at me with suppressed eagerness.<br /><br />"I talked with Miss Baker," I said after a moment. "I'm going to call up<br />Daisy tomorrow and invite her over here to tea."<br /><br />"Oh, that's all right," he said carelessly. "I don't want to put you to<br />any trouble."<br /><br />"What day would suit you?"<br /><br />"What day would suit YOU?" he corrected me quickly. "I don't want to put<br />you to any trouble, you see."<br /><br />"How about the day after tomorrow?" He considered for a moment. Then,<br />with reluctance:<br /><br />"I want to get the grass cut," he said.<br /><br />We both looked at the grass--there was a sharp line where my ragged lawn<br />ended and the darker, well-kept expanse of his began. I suspected that<br />he meant my grass.<br /><br />"There's another little thing," he said uncertainly, and hesitated.<br /><br />"Would you rather put it off for a few days?" I asked.<br /><br />"Oh, it isn't about that. At least----" He fumbled with a series of<br />beginnings. "Why, I thought--why, look here, old sport, you don't make<br />much money, do you?"<br /><br />"Not very much."<br /><br />This seemed to reassure him and he continued more confidently.<br /><br />"I thought you didn't, if you'll pardon my--you see, I carry on a<br />little business on the side, a sort of sideline, you understand. And I<br />thought that if you don't make very much--You're selling bonds, aren't<br />you, old sport?"<br /><br />"Trying to."<br /><br />"Well, this would interest you. It wouldn't take up much of your<br />time and you might pick up a nice bit of money. It happens to be<br />a rather confidential sort of thing."<br /><br />I realize now that under different circumstances that conversation might<br />have been one of the crises of my life. But, because the offer was<br />obviously and tactlessly for a service to be rendered, I had no choice<br />except to cut him off there.<br /><br />"I've got my hands full," I said. "I'm much obliged but I couldn't take<br />on any more work."<br /><br />"You wouldn't have to do any business with Wolfshiem." Evidently he<br />thought that I was shying away from the "gonnegtion" mentioned at lunch,<br />but I assured him he was wrong. He waited a moment longer, hoping I'd<br />begin a conversation, but I was too absorbed to be responsive, so he went<br />unwillingly home.<br /><br />The evening had made me light-headed and happy; I think I walked into a<br />deep sleep as I entered my front door. So I didn't know whether or not<br />Gatsby went to Coney Island or for how many hours he "glanced into<br />rooms" while his house blazed gaudily on. I called up Daisy from the<br />office next morning and invited her to come to tea.<br /><br />"Don't bring Tom," I warned her.<br /><br />"What?"<br /><br />"Don't bring Tom."<br /><br />"Who is 'Tom'?" she asked innocently.<br /><br />The day agreed upon was pouring rain. At eleven o'clock a man in a<br />raincoat dragging a lawn-mower tapped at my front door and said that<br />Mr. Gatsby had sent him over to cut my grass. This reminded me that I<br />had forgotten to tell my Finn to come back so I drove into West Egg<br />Village to search for her among soggy white-washed alleys and to buy<br />some cups and lemons and flowers.<br /><br />The flowers were unnecessary, for at two o'clock a greenhouse arrived<br />from Gatsby's, with innumerable receptacles to contain it. An hour<br />later the front door opened nervously, and Gatsby in a white flannel<br />suit, silver shirt and gold-colored tie hurried in. He was pale and<br />there were dark signs of sleeplessness beneath his eyes.<br /><br />"Is everything all right?" he asked immediately.<br /><br />"The grass looks fine, if that's what you mean."<br /><br />"What grass?" he inquired blankly. "Oh, the grass in the yard." He looked<br />out the window at it, but judging from his expression I don't believe<br />he saw a thing.<br /><br />"Looks very good," he remarked vaguely. "One of the papers said they<br />thought the rain would stop about four. I think it was 'The Journal.' Have<br />you got everything you need in the shape of--of tea?"<br /><br />I took him into the pantry where he looked a little reproachfully at the<br />Finn. Together we scrutinized the twelve lemon cakes from the delicatessen<br />shop.<br /><br />"Will they do?" I asked.<br /><br />"Of course, of course! They're fine!" and he added hollowly, ". . .old<br />sport."<br /><br />The rain cooled about half-past three to a damp mist through which<br />occasional thin drops swam like dew. Gatsby looked with vacant eyes<br />through a copy of Clay's "Economics," starting at the Finnish tread that<br />shook the kitchen floor and peering toward the bleared windows from time<br />to time as if a series of invisible but alarming happenings were taking<br />place outside. Finally he got up and informed me in an uncertain voice<br />that he was going home.<br /><br />"Why's that?"<br /><br />"Nobody's coming to tea. It's too late!" He looked at his watch as if<br />there was some pressing demand on his time elsewhere. "I can't wait<br />all day."<br /><br />"Don't be silly; it's just two minutes to four."<br /><br />He sat down, miserably, as if I had pushed him, and simultaneously there<br />was the sound of a motor turning into my lane. We both jumped up and,<br />a little harrowed myself, I went out into the yard.<br /><br />Under the dripping bare lilac trees a large open car was coming up the<br />drive. It stopped. Daisy's face, tipped sideways beneath a<br />three-cornered lavender hat, looked out at me with a bright ecstatic<br />smile.<br /><br />"Is this absolutely where you live, my dearest one?"<br /><br />The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I had<br />to follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone<br />before any words came through. A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of<br />blue paint across her cheek and her hand was wet with glistening drops as<br />I took it to help her from the car.<br /><br />"Are you in love with me," she said low in my ear. "Or why did I have<br />to come alone?"<br /><br />"That's the secret of Castle Rackrent. Tell your chauffeur to go far<br />away and spend an hour."<br /><br />"Come back in an hour, Ferdie." Then in a grave murmur, "His name is<br />Ferdie."<br /><br />"Does the gasoline affect his nose?"<br /><br />"I don't think so," she said innocently. "Why?"<br /><br />We went in. To my overwhelming surprise the living room was deserted.<br /><br />"Well, that's funny!" I exclaimed.<br /><br />"What's funny?"<br /><br />She turned her head as there was a light, dignified knocking at the front<br />door. I went out and opened it. Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands<br />plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of<br />water glaring tragically into my eyes.<br /><br />With his hands still in his coat pockets he stalked by me into the<br />hall, turned sharply as if he were on a wire and disappeared into the<br />living room. It wasn't a bit funny. Aware of the loud beating of my own<br />heart I pulled the door to against the increasing rain.<br /><br />For half a minute there wasn't a sound. Then from the living room I<br />heard a sort of choking murmur and part of a laugh followed by Daisy's<br />voice on a clear artificial note.<br /><br />"I certainly am awfully glad to see you again."<br /><br />A pause; it endured horribly. I had nothing to do in the hall so I went<br />into the room.<br /><br />Gatsby, his hands still in his pockets, was reclining against the<br />mantelpiece in a strained counterfeit of perfect ease, even of boredom.<br />His head leaned back so far that it rested against the face of a<br />defunct mantelpiece clock and from this position his distraught eyes<br />stared down at Daisy who was sitting frightened but graceful on the<br />edge of a stiff chair.<br /><br />"We've met before," muttered Gatsby. His eyes glanced momentarily at<br />me and his lips parted with an abortive attempt at a laugh. Luckily<br />the clock took this moment to tilt dangerously at the pressure of his<br />head, whereupon he turned and caught it with trembling fingers and set<br />it back in place. Then he sat down, rigidly, his elbow on the arm of the<br />sofa and his chin in his hand.<br /><br />"I'm sorry about the clock," he said.<br /><br />My own face had now assumed a deep tropical burn. I couldn't muster up<br />a single commonplace out of the thousand in my head.<br /><br />"It's an old clock," I told them idiotically.<br /><br />I think we all believed for a moment that it had smashed in pieces on<br />the floor.<br /><br />"We haven't met for many years," said Daisy, her voice as matter-of-fact<br />as it could ever be.<br /><br />"Five years next November."<br /><br />The automatic quality of Gatsby's answer set us all back at least another<br />minute. I had them both on their feet with the desperate suggestion that<br />they help me make tea in the kitchen when the demoniac Finn brought it in<br />on a tray.<br /><br />Amid the welcome confusion of cups and cakes a certain physical decency<br />established itself. Gatsby got himself into a shadow and while Daisy<br />and I talked looked conscientiously from one to the other of us with<br />tense unhappy eyes. However, as calmness wasn't an end in itself I<br />made an excuse at the first possible moment and got to my feet.<br /><br />"Where are you going?" demanded Gatsby in immediate alarm.<br /><br />"I'll be back."<br /><br />"I've got to speak to you about something before you go."<br /><br />He followed me wildly into the kitchen, closed the door and whispered:<br />"Oh, God!" in a miserable way.<br /><br />"What's the matter?"<br /><br />"This is a terrible mistake," he said, shaking his head from side to<br />side, "a terrible, terrible mistake."<br /><br />"You're just embarrassed, that's all," and luckily I added: "Daisy's<br />embarrassed too."<br /><br />"She's embarrassed?" he repeated incredulously.<br /><br />"Just as much as you are."<br /><br />"Don't talk so loud."<br /><br />"You're acting like a little boy," I broke out impatiently. "Not only<br />that but you're rude. Daisy's sitting in there all alone."<br /><br /><br />He raised his hand to stop my words, looked at me with unforgettable<br />reproach and opening the door cautiously went back into the other room.<br /><br />I walked out the back way--just as Gatsby had when he had made his<br />nervous circuit of the house half an hour before--and ran for a huge<br />black knotted tree whose massed leaves made a fabric against the rain.<br />Once more it was pouring and my irregular lawn, well-shaved by<br />Gatsby's gardener, abounded in small muddy swamps and prehistoric<br />marshes. There was nothing to look at from under the tree except<br />Gatsby's enormous house, so I stared at it, like Kant at his church<br />steeple, for half an hour. A brewer had built it early in the "period"<br />craze, a decade before, and there was a story that he'd agreed to pay<br />five years' taxes on all the neighboring cottages if the owners would<br />have their roofs thatched with straw. Perhaps their refusal took the<br />heart out of his plan to Found a Family--he went into an immediate<br />decline. His children sold his house with the black wreath still on the<br />door. Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always<br />been obstinate about being peasantry.<br /><br />After half an hour the sun shone again and the grocer's automobile<br />rounded Gatsby's drive with the raw material for his servants' dinner--I<br />felt sure he wouldn't eat a spoonful. A maid began opening the upper<br />windows of his house, appeared momentarily in each, and, leaning from a<br />large central bay, spat meditatively into the garden. It was time I<br />went back. While the rain continued it had seemed like the murmur of<br />their voices, rising and swelling a little, now and the, with gusts of<br />emotion. But in the new silence I felt that silence had fallen within<br />the house too.<br /><br />I went in--after making every possible noise in the kitchen short of<br />pushing over the stove--but I don't believe they heard a sound. They<br />were sitting at either end of the couch looking at each other as if<br />some question had been asked or was in the air, and every vestige of<br />embarrassment was gone. Daisy's face was smeared with tears and when I<br />came in she jumped up and began wiping at it with her handkerchief before<br />a mirror. But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding.<br />He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new<br />well-being radiated from him and filled the little room.<br /><br />"Oh, hello, old sport," he said, as if he hadn't seen me for years. I<br />thought for a moment he was going to shake hands.<br /><br />"It's stopped raining."<br /><br />"Has it?" When he realized what I was talking about, that there were<br />twinkle-bells of sunshine in the room, he smiled like a weather man,<br />like an ecstatic patron of recurrent light, and repeated the news to<br />Daisy. "What do you think of that? It's stopped raining."<br /><br />"I'm glad, Jay." Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told only<br />of her unexpected joy.<br /><br />"I want you and Daisy to come over to my house," he said, "I'd like to<br />show her around."<br /><br />"You're sure you want me to come?"<br /><br />"Absolutely, old sport."<br /><br />Daisy went upstairs to wash her face--too late I thought with humiliation<br />of my towels--while Gatsby and I waited on the lawn.<br /><br />"My house looks well, doesn't it?" he demanded. "See how the whole<br />front of it catches the light."<br /><br />I agreed that it was splendid.<br /><br />"Yes." His eyes went over it, every arched door and square tower. "It took<br />me just three years to earn the money that bought it."<br /><br />"I thought you inherited your money."<br /><br />"I did, old sport," he said automatically, "but I lost most of it in<br />the big panic--the panic of the war."<br /><br />I think he hardly knew what he was saying, for when I asked him what<br />business he was in he answered "That's my affair," before he realized<br />that it wasn't the appropriate reply.<br /><br />"Oh, I've been in several things," he corrected himself. "I was in the<br />drug business and then I was in the oil business. But I'm not in either<br />one now." He looked at me with more attention. "Do you mean you've been<br />thinking over what I proposed the other night?"<br /><br />Before I could answer, Daisy came out of the house and two rows of brass<br />buttons on her dress gleamed in the sunlight.<br /><br />"That huge place THERE?" she cried pointing.<br /><br />"Do you like it?"<br /><br />"I love it, but I don't see how you live there all alone."<br /><br />"I keep it always full of interesting people, night and day. People who<br />do interesting things. Celebrated people."<br /><br />Instead of taking the short cut along the Sound we went down the road and<br />entered by the big postern. With enchanting murmurs Daisy admired this<br />aspect or that of the feudal silhouette against the sky, admired the<br />gardens, the sparkling odor of jonquils and the frothy odor of hawthorn<br />and plum blossoms and the pale gold odor of kiss-me-at-the-gate.<br />It was strange to reach the marble steps and find no stir of bright<br />dresses in and out the door, and hear no sound but bird voices in the<br />trees.<br /><br />And inside as we wandered through Marie Antoinette music rooms and<br />Restoration salons I felt that there were guests concealed behind<br />every couch and table, under orders to be breathlessly silent until we<br />had passed through. As Gatsby closed the door of "the Merton College<br />Library" I could have sworn I heard the owl-eyed man break into<br />ghostly laughter.<br /><br />We went upstairs, through period bedrooms swathed in rose and lavender<br />silk and vivid with new flowers, through dressing rooms and poolrooms,<br />and bathrooms with sunken baths--intruding into one chamber where a<br />dishevelled man in pajamas was doing liver exercises on the floor. It<br />was Mr. Klipspringer, the "boarder." I had seen him wandering hungrily<br />about the beach that morning. Finally we came to Gatsby's own apartment,<br />a bedroom and a bath and an Adam study, where we sat down and drank a<br />glass of some Chartreuse he took from a cupboard in the wall.<br /><br />He hadn't once ceased looking at Daisy and I think he revalued<br />everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew<br />from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his<br />possessions in a dazed way as though in her actual and astounding<br />presence none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly toppled down a<br />flight of stairs.<br /><br />His bedroom was the simplest room of all--except where the dresser was<br />garnished with a toilet set of pure dull gold. Daisy took the brush<br />with delight and smoothed her hair, whereupon Gatsby sat down and<br />shaded his eyes and began to laugh.<br /><br />"It's the funniest thing, old sport," he said hilariously. "I can't--when<br />I try to----"<br /><br />He had passed visibly through two states and was entering upon a third.<br />After his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed with<br />wonder at her presence. He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it<br />right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an<br />inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running<br />down like an overwound clock.<br /><br />Recovering himself in a minute he opened for us two hulking patent<br />cabinets which held his massed suits and dressing-gowns and ties, and<br />his shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.<br /><br />"I've got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection<br />of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall."<br /><br />He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one<br />before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel<br />which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in<br />many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft<br />rich heap mounted higher--shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in<br />coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange with monograms of<br />Indian blue. Suddenly with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into<br />the shirts and began to cry stormily.<br /><br />"They're such beautiful shirts," she sobbed, her voice muffled in the<br />thick folds. "It makes me sad because I've never seen such--such beautiful<br />shirts before."<br /><br /><br />After the house, we were to see the grounds and the swimming pool, and the<br />hydroplane and the midsummer flowers--but outside Gatsby's window it<br />began to rain again so we stood in a row looking at the corrugated<br />surface of the Sound.<br /><br />"If it wasn't for the mist we could see your home across the bay," said<br />Gatsby. "You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of<br />your dock."<br /><br />Daisy put her arm through his abruptly but he seemed absorbed<br />in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the<br />colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared<br />to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed<br />very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star<br />to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of<br />enchanted objects had diminished by one.<br /><br />I began to walk about the room, examining various indefinite objects in<br />the half darkness. A large photograph of an elderly man in yachting<br />costume attracted me, hung on the wall over his desk.<br /><br />"Who's this?"<br /><br />"That? That's Mr. Dan Cody, old sport."<br /><br />The name sounded faintly familiar.<br /><br />"He's dead now. He used to be my best friend years ago."<br /><br />There was a small picture of Gatsby, also in yachting costume, on the<br />bureau--Gatsby with his head thrown back defiantly--taken apparently<br />when he was about eighteen.<br /><br />"I adore it!" exclaimed Daisy. "The pompadour! You never told me you had<br />a pompadour--or a yacht."<br /><br />"Look at this," said Gatsby quickly. "Here's a lot of clippings--about<br />you."<br /><br />They stood side by side examining it. I was going to ask to see the rubies<br />when the phone rang and Gatsby took up the receiver.<br /><br />"Yes. . . . Well, I can't talk now. . . . I can't talk now, old<br />sport. . . . I said a SMALL town. . . . He must know what a small town<br />is. . . . Well, he's no use to us if Detroit is his idea of a small<br />town. . . ."<br /><br />He rang off.<br /><br />"Come here QUICK!" cried Daisy at the window.<br /><br />The rain was still falling, but the darkness had parted in the west,<br />and there was a pink and golden billow of foamy clouds above the sea.<br /><br />"Look at that," she whispered, and then after a moment: "I'd like to<br />just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you<br />around."<br /><br />I tried to go then, but they wouldn't hear of it; perhaps my presence<br />made them feel more satisfactorily alone.<br /><br />"I know what we'll do," said Gatsby, "we'll have Klipspringer play the<br />piano."<br /><br />He went out of the room calling "Ewing!" and returned in a few<br />minutes accompanied by an embarrassed, slightly worn young man with<br />shell-rimmed glasses and scanty blonde hair. He was now decently clothed<br />in a "sport shirt" open at the neck, sneakers and duck trousers of a<br />nebulous hue.<br /><br />"Did we interrupt your exercises?" inquired Daisy politely.<br /><br />"I was asleep," cried Mr. Klipspringer, in a spasm of embarrassment.<br />"That is, I'd BEEN asleep. Then I got up. . . ."<br /><br />"Klipspringer plays the piano," said Gatsby, cutting him off. "Don't you,<br />Ewing, old sport?"<br /><br />"I don't play well. I don't--I hardly play at all. I'm all out of<br />prac----"<br /><br />"We'll go downstairs," interrupted Gatsby. He flipped a switch. The<br />grey windows disappeared as the house glowed full of light.<br /><br />In the music room Gatsby turned on a solitary lamp beside the piano. He<br />lit Daisy's cigarette from a trembling match, and sat down with her on<br />a couch far across the room where there was no light save what the<br />gleaming floor bounced in from the hall.<br /><br />When Klipspringer had played "The Love Nest" he turned around on the<br />bench and searched unhappily for Gatsby in the gloom.<br /><br />"I'm all out of practice, you see. I told you I couldn't play. I'm all<br />out of prac----"<br /><br />"Don't talk so much, old sport," commanded Gatsby. "Play!"<br /><br /><br /> IN THE MORNING,<br /> IN THE EVENING,<br /> AIN'T WE GOT FUN----<br /><br />Outside the wind was loud and there was a faint flow of thunder along the<br />Sound. All the lights were going on in West Egg now; the electric trains,<br />men-carrying, were plunging home through the rain from New York. It was<br />the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on<br />the air.<br /><br /><br /> ONE THING'S SURE AND NOTHING'S SURER<br /> THE RICH GET RICHER AND THE POOR GET--CHILDREN.<br /> IN THE MEANTIME,<br /> IN BETWEEN TIME----<br /><br /><br />As I went over to say goodbye I saw that the expression of bewilderment<br />had come back into Gatsby's face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to<br />him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five<br />years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when<br />Daisy tumbled short of his dreams--not through her own fault but<br />because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond<br />her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative<br />passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright<br />feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can<br />challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.<br /><br />As I watched him he adjusted himself a little, visibly. His hand took<br />hold of hers and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward<br />her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most with its<br />fluctuating, feverish warmth because it couldn't be over-dreamed--that<br />voice was a deathless song.<br /><br />They had forgotten me, but Daisy glanced up and held out her hand;<br />Gatsby didn't know me now at all. I looked once more at them and they<br />looked back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life. Then I went out<br />of the room and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them there<br />together.</pre><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span>Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13783659974416042562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5033984040361137541.post-53116371062798896242007-02-06T07:31:00.000-08:002007-02-06T07:42:31.470-08:00Chapter 4<pre style="font-family: verdana;">On Sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages along shore<br />the world and its mistress returned to Gatsby's house and twinkled<br />hilariously on his lawn.<br /><br />"He's a bootlegger," said the young ladies, moving somewhere between<br />his cocktails and his flowers. "One time he killed a man who had found out<br />that he was nephew to von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil.<br />Reach me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that there crystal<br />glass."<br /><br />Once I wrote down on the empty spaces of a time-table the names<br />of those who came to Gatsby's house that summer. It is an old time-table<br />now, disintegrating at its folds and headed "This schedule in effect<br />July 5th, 1922." But I can still read the grey names and they will give<br />you a better impression than my generalities of those who accepted<br />Gatsby's hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing nothing<br />whatever about him.<br /><br />From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches and a<br />man named Bunsen whom I knew at Yale and Doctor Webster Civet who<br />was drowned last summer up in Maine. And the Hornbeams and the Willie<br />Voltaires and a whole clan named Blackbuck who always gathered in a<br />corner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosoever came near.<br />And the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr.<br />Chrystie's wife) and Edgar Beaver, whose hair they say turned<br />cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all.<br /><br />Clarence Endive was from East Egg, as I remember. He came only<br />once, in white knickerbockers, and had a fight with a bum named<br />Etty in the garden. From farther out on the Island came the Cheadles<br />and the O. R. P. Schraeders and the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of<br />Georgia and the Fishguards and the Ripley Snells. Snell was there<br />three days before he went to the penitentiary, so drunk out on the<br />gravel drive that Mrs. Ulysses Swett's automobile ran over his right<br />hand. The Dancies came too and S. B. Whitebait, who was well over<br />sixty, and Maurice A. Flink and the Hammerheads and Beluga the<br />tobacco importer and Beluga's girls.<br /><br />From West Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys and Cecil Roebuck and<br />Cecil Schoen and Gulick the state senator and Newton Orchid who<br />controlled Films Par Excellence and Eckhaust and Clyde Cohen and Don<br />S. Schwartze (the son) and Arthur McCarty, all connected with the<br />movies in one way or another. And the Catlips and the Bembergs and G.<br />Earl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon who afterward strangled his wife.<br />Da Fontano the promoter came there, and Ed Legros and James B.<br />("Rot-Gut") Ferret and the De Jongs and Ernest Lilly--they came to<br />gamble and when Ferret wandered into the garden it meant he was<br />cleaned out and Associated Traction would have to fluctuate profitably<br />next day.<br /><br />A man named Klipspringer was there so often and so long that he became<br />known as "the boarder"--I doubt if he had any other home. Of theatrical<br />people there were Gus Waize and Horace O'Donavan and Lester Meyer and<br />George Duckweed and Francis Bull. Also from New York were the Chromes<br />and the Backhyssons and the Dennickers and Russel Betty and the<br />Corrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewars and the Scullys and S. W.<br />Belcher and the Smirkes and the young Quinns, divorced now, and Henry<br />L. Palmetto who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train<br />in Times Square.<br /><br />Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls. They were never quite<br />the same ones in physical person but they were so identical one with<br />another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before. I have<br />forgotten their names--Jaqueline, I think, or else Consuela or Gloria<br />or Judy or June, and their last names were either the melodious names<br />of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American<br />capitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to<br />be.<br /><br />In addition to all these I can remember that Faustina O'Brien came<br />there at least once and the Baedeker girls and young Brewer who had<br />his nose shot off in the war and Mr. Albrucksburger and Miss Haag, his<br />fiancée, and Ardita Fitz-Peters, and Mr. P. Jewett, once head of the<br />American Legion, and Miss Claudia Hip with a man reputed to be her<br />chauffeur, and a prince of something whom we called Duke and whose name,<br />if I ever knew it, I have forgotten.<br /><br />All these people came to Gatsby's house in the summer.<br /><br /><br />At nine o'clock, one morning late in July Gatsby's gorgeous car<br />lurched up the rocky drive to my door and gave out a burst of melody<br />from its three noted horn. It was the first time he had called on me<br />though I had gone to two of his parties, mounted in his hydroplane,<br />and, at his urgent invitation, made frequent use of his beach.<br /><br />"Good morning, old sport. You're having lunch with me today and I<br />thought we'd ride up together."<br /><br />He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that<br />resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American--that comes,<br />I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in youth<br />and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games.<br />This quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in<br />the shape of restlessness. He was never quite still; there was always a<br />tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand.<br /><br />He saw me looking with admiration at his car.<br /><br />"It's pretty, isn't it, old sport." He jumped off to give me a better<br />view. "Haven't you ever seen it before?"<br /><br />I'd seen it. Everybody had seen it. It was a rich cream color, bright<br />with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with<br />triumphant hatboxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a<br />labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down behind<br />many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory we started<br />to town.<br /><br />I had talked with him perhaps half a dozen times in the past month and<br />found, to my disappointment, that he had little to say. So my first<br />impression, that he was a person of some undefined consequence, had<br />gradually faded and he had become simply the proprietor of an elaborate<br />roadhouse next door.<br /><br />And then came that disconcerting ride. We hadn't reached West Egg<br />village before Gatsby began leaving his elegant sentences unfinished<br />and slapping himself indecisively on the knee of his caramel-colored<br />suit.<br /><br />"Look here, old sport," he broke out surprisingly. "What's your opinion<br />of me, anyhow?"<br /><br />A little overwhelmed, I began the generalized evasions which<br />that question deserves.<br /><br />"Well, I'm going to tell you something about my life," he interrupted.<br />"I don't want you to get a wrong idea of me from all these stories you<br />hear."<br /><br />So he was aware of the bizarre accusations that flavored conversation in<br />his halls.<br /><br />"I'll tell you God's truth." His right hand suddenly ordered divine<br />retribution to stand by. "I am the son of some wealthy people in the<br />middle-west--all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at<br />Oxford because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years.<br />It is a family tradition."<br /><br />He looked at me sideways--and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was<br />lying. He hurried the phrase "educated at Oxford," or swallowed it or<br />choked on it as though it had bothered him before. And with this doubt<br />his whole statement fell to pieces and I wondered if there wasn't<br />something a little sinister about him after all.<br /><br />"What part of the middle-west?" I inquired casually.<br /><br />"San Francisco."<br /><br />"I see."<br /><br />"My family all died and I came into a good deal of money."<br /><br />His voice was solemn as if the memory of that sudden extinction of a clan<br />still haunted him. For a moment I suspected that he was pulling my leg<br />but a glance at him convinced me otherwise.<br /><br />"After that I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of<br />Europe--Paris, Venice, Rome--collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting<br />big game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to<br />forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago."<br /><br />With an effort I managed to restrain my incredulous laughter. The very<br />phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that of a<br />turbaned "character" leaking sawdust at every pore as he pursued a<br />tiger through the Bois de Boulogne.<br /><br />"Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief and I tried very<br />hard to die but I seemed to bear an enchanted life. I accepted a<br />commission as first lieutenant when it began. In the Argonne Forest I<br />took two machine-gun detachments so far forward that there was a half<br />mile gap on either side of us where the infantry couldn't advance. We<br />stayed there two days and two nights, a hundred and thirty men with<br />sixteen Lewis guns, and when the infantry came up at last they found<br />the insignia of three German divisions among the piles of dead. I was<br />promoted to be a major and every Allied government gave me a<br />decoration--even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the Adriatic<br />Sea!"<br /><br />Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them--with<br />his smile. The smile comprehended Montenegro's troubled history and<br />sympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. It<br />appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances which had<br />elicited this tribute from Montenegro's warm little heart. My<br />incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming<br />hastily through a dozen magazines.<br /><br />He reached in his pocket and a piece of metal, slung on a ribbon, fell<br />into my palm.<br /><br />"That's the one from Montenegro."<br /><br />To my astonishment, the thing had an authentic look.<br /><br />_Orderi di Danilo_, ran the circular legend, _Montenegro, Nicolas Rex_.<br /><br />"Turn it."<br /><br />_Major Jay Gatsby_, I read, _For Valour Extraordinary_.<br /><br />"Here's another thing I always carry. A souvenir of Oxford days. It was<br />taken in Trinity Quad--the man on my left is now the Earl of Dorcaster."<br /><br />It was a photograph of half a dozen young men in blazers loafing in an<br />archway through which were visible a host of spires. There was Gatsby,<br />looking a little, not much, younger--with a cricket bat in his hand.<br /><br />Then it was all true. I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace<br />on the Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with<br />their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart.<br /><br />"I'm going to make a big request of you today," he said, pocketing his<br />souvenirs with satisfaction, "so I thought you ought to know something<br />about me. I didn't want you to think I was just some nobody. You see,<br />I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there<br />trying to forget the sad thing that happened to me." He hesitated.<br />"You'll hear about it this afternoon."<br /><br />"At lunch?"<br /><br />"No, this afternoon. I happened to find out that you're taking Miss Baker<br />to tea."<br /><br />"Do you mean you're in love with Miss Baker?"<br /><br />"No, old sport, I'm not. But Miss Baker has kindly consented to speak<br />to you about this matter."<br /><br />I hadn't the faintest idea what "this matter" was, but I was more<br />annoyed than interested. I hadn't asked Jordan to tea in order to discuss<br />Mr. Jay Gatsby. I was sure the request would be something utterly<br />fantastic and for a moment I was sorry I'd ever set foot upon his<br />overpopulated lawn.<br /><br />He wouldn't say another word. His correctness grew on him as we neared<br />the city. We passed Port Roosevelt, where there was a glimpse of<br />red-belted ocean-going ships, and sped along a cobbled slum lined with<br />the dark, undeserted saloons of the faded gilt nineteen-hundreds. Then<br />the valley of ashes opened out on both sides of us, and I had a glimpse<br />of Mrs. Wilson straining at the garage pump with panting vitality as we<br />went by.<br /><br />With fenders spread like wings we scattered light through half<br />Astoria--only half, for as we twisted among the pillars of the<br />elevated I heard the familiar "jug--jug--SPAT!" of a motor cycle, and a<br />frantic policeman rode alongside.<br /><br />"All right, old sport," called Gatsby. We slowed down. Taking a white<br />card from his wallet he waved it before the man's eyes.<br /><br />"Right you are," agreed the policeman, tipping his cap. "Know you next<br />time, Mr. Gatsby. Excuse ME!"<br /><br />"What was that?" I inquired. "The picture of Oxford?"<br /><br />"I was able to do the commissioner a favor once, and he sends me a<br />Christmas card every year."<br /><br />Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a<br />constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the<br />river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of<br />non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always<br />the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the<br />mystery and the beauty in the world.<br /><br />A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two<br />carriages with drawn blinds and by more cheerful carriages for<br />friends. The friends looked out at us with the tragic eyes and short<br />upper lips of south-eastern Europe, and I was glad that the sight of<br />Gatsby's splendid car was included in their somber holiday. As we<br />crossed Blackwell's Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white<br />chauffeur, in which sat three modish Negroes, two bucks and a girl. I<br />laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in<br />haughty rivalry.<br /><br />"Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge," I thought;<br />"anything at all. . . ."<br /><br />Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.<br /><br /><br />Roaring noon. In a well-fanned Forty-second Street cellar I met Gatsby<br />for lunch. Blinking away the brightness of the street outside my eyes<br />picked him out obscurely in the anteroom, talking to another man.<br /><br />"Mr. Carraway this is my friend Mr. Wolfshiem."<br /><br />A small, flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two<br />fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril. After a moment I<br />discovered his tiny eyes in the half darkness.<br /><br />"--so I took one look at him--" said Mr. Wolfshiem, shaking my hand<br />earnestly, "--and what do you think I did?"<br /><br />"What?" I inquired politely.<br /><br />But evidently he was not addressing me for he dropped my hand and<br />covered Gatsby with his expressive nose.<br /><br />"I handed the money to Katspaugh and I sid, 'All right, Katspaugh,<br />don't pay him a penny till he shuts his mouth.' He shut it then and<br />there."<br /><br />Gatsby took an arm of each of us and moved forward into the<br />restaurant whereupon Mr. Wolfshiem swallowed a new sentence he was<br />starting and lapsed into a somnambulatory abstraction.<br /><br />"Highballs?" asked the head waiter.<br /><br />"This is a nice restaurant here," said Mr. Wolfshiem looking at the<br />Presbyterian nymphs on the ceiling. "But I like across the street better!"<br /><br />"Yes, highballs," agreed Gatsby, and then to Mr. Wolfshiem: "It's too hot<br />over there."<br /><br />"Hot and small--yes," said Mr. Wolfshiem, "but full of memories."<br /><br />"What place is that?" I asked.<br /><br />"The old Metropole.<br /><br />"The old Metropole," brooded Mr. Wolfshiem gloomily. "Filled with faces<br />dead and gone. Filled with friends gone now forever. I can't forget so<br />long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there. It was six of us<br />at the table and Rosy had eat and drunk a lot all evening. When it was<br />almost morning the waiter came up to him with a funny look and says<br />somebody wants to speak to him outside. 'All right,' says Rosy and begins<br />to get up and I pulled him down in his chair.<br /><br />" 'Let the bastards come in here if they want you, Rosy, but don't you,<br />so help me, move outside this room.'<br /><br />"It was four o'clock in the morning then, and if we'd of raised the blinds<br />we'd of seen daylight."<br /><br />"Did he go?" I asked innocently.<br /><br />"Sure he went,"--Mr. Wolfshiem's nose flashed at me indignantly--"He<br />turned around in the door and says, 'Don't let that waiter take away<br />my coffee!' Then he went out on the sidewalk and they shot him<br />three times in his full belly and drove away."<br /><br />"Four of them were electrocuted," I said, remembering.<br /><br />"Five with Becker." His nostrils turned to me in an interested way.<br />"I understand you're looking for a business gonnegtion."<br /><br />The juxtaposition of these two remarks was startling. Gatsby answered<br />for me:<br /><br />"Oh, no," he exclaimed, "this isn't the man!"<br /><br />"No?" Mr. Wolfshiem seemed disappointed.<br /><br />"This is just a friend. I told you we'd talk about that some other<br />time."<br /><br />"I beg your pardon," said Mr. Wolfshiem, "I had a wrong man."<br /><br />A succulent hash arrived, and Mr. Wolfshiem, forgetting the more<br />sentimental atmosphere of the old Metropole, began to eat with<br />ferocious delicacy. His eyes, meanwhile, roved very slowly all around the<br />room--he completed the arc by turning to inspect the people directly<br />behind. I think that, except for my presence, he would have taken one<br />short glance beneath our own table.<br /><br />"Look here, old sport," said Gatsby, leaning toward me, "I'm afraid I<br />made you a little angry this morning in the car."<br /><br />There was the smile again, but this time I held out against it.<br /><br />"I don't like mysteries," I answered. "And I don't understand why you<br />won't come out frankly and tell me what you want. Why has it all got to<br />come through Miss Baker?"<br /><br />"Oh, it's nothing underhand," he assured me. "Miss Baker's a great<br />sportswoman, you know, and she'd never do anything that wasn't all right."<br /><br />Suddenly he looked at his watch, jumped up and hurried from the room<br />leaving me with Mr. Wolfshiem at the table.<br /><br />"He has to telephone," said Mr. Wolfshiem, following him with his eyes.<br />"Fine fellow, isn't he? Handsome to look at and a perfect gentleman."<br /><br />"Yes."<br /><br />"He's an Oggsford man."<br /><br />"Oh!"<br /><br />"He went to Oggsford College in England. You know Oggsford College?"<br /><br />"I've heard of it."<br /><br />"It's one of the most famous colleges in the world."<br /><br />"Have you known Gatsby for a long time?" I inquired.<br /><br />"Several years," he answered in a gratified way. "I made the pleasure of<br />his acquaintance just after the war. But I knew I had discovered a man of<br />fine breeding after I talked with him an hour. I said to myself: 'There's<br />the kind of man you'd like to take home and introduce to your mother and<br />sister.' " He paused. "I see you're looking at my cuff buttons."<br /><br />I hadn't been looking at them, but I did now. They were composed of<br />oddly familiar pieces of ivory.<br /><br />"Finest specimens of human molars," he informed me.<br /><br />"Well!" I inspected them. "That's a very interesting idea."<br /><br />"Yeah." He flipped his sleeves up under his coat. "Yeah, Gatsby's very<br />careful about women. He would never so much as look at a friend's wife."<br /><br />When the subject of this instinctive trust returned to the table and sat<br />down Mr. Wolfshiem drank his coffee with a jerk and got to his feet.<br /><br />"I have enjoyed my lunch," he said, "and I'm going to run off from you<br />two young men before I outstay my welcome."<br /><br />"Don't hurry, Meyer," said Gatsby, without enthusiasm. Mr. Wolfshiem<br />raised his hand in a sort of benediction.<br /><br />"You're very polite but I belong to another generation," he announced<br />solemnly. "You sit here and discuss your sports and your young ladies and<br />your----" He supplied an imaginary noun with another wave of his<br />hand--"As for me, I am fifty years old, and I won't impose myself<br />on you any longer."<br /><br />As he shook hands and turned away his tragic nose was trembling.<br />I wondered if I had said anything to offend him.<br /><br />"He becomes very sentimental sometimes," explained Gatsby. "This is one of<br />his sentimental days. He's quite a character around New York--a denizen of<br />Broadway."<br /><br />"Who is he anyhow--an actor?"<br /><br />"No."<br /><br />"A dentist?"<br /><br />"Meyer Wolfshiem? No, he's a gambler." Gatsby hesitated, then added<br />coolly: "He's the man who fixed the World's Series back in 1919."<br /><br />"Fixed the World's Series?" I repeated.<br /><br />The idea staggered me. I remembered of course that the World's Series<br />had been fixed in 1919 but if I had thought of it at all I would have<br />thought of it as a thing that merely HAPPENED, the end of some<br />inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to<br />play with the faith of fifty million people--with the single-mindedness<br />of a burglar blowing a safe.<br /><br />"How did he happen to do that?" I asked after a minute.<br /><br />"He just saw the opportunity."<br /><br />"Why isn't he in jail?"<br /><br />"They can't get him, old sport. He's a smart man."<br /><br />I insisted on paying the check. As the waiter brought my change I caught<br />sight of Tom Buchanan across the crowded room.<br /><br />"Come along with me for a minute," I said. "I've got to say hello<br />to someone."<br /><br />When he saw us Tom jumped up and took half a dozen steps in our<br />direction.<br /><br />"Where've you been?" he demanded eagerly. "Daisy's furious because you<br />haven't called up."<br /><br />"This is Mr. Gatsby, Mr. Buchanan."<br /><br />They shook hands briefly and a strained, unfamiliar look of embarrassment<br />came over Gatsby's face.<br /><br />"How've you been, anyhow?" demanded Tom of me. "How'd you happen to come<br />up this far to eat?"<br /><br />"I've been having lunch with Mr. Gatsby."<br /><br />I turned toward Mr. Gatsby, but he was no longer there.<br /><br /><br />One October day in nineteen-seventeen----<br />(said Jordan Baker that afternoon, sitting up very straight on a straight<br />chair in the tea-garden at the Plaza Hotel)<br />--I was walking along from one place to another half on the sidewalks and<br />half on the lawns. I was happier on the lawns because I had on shoes from<br />England with rubber nobs on the soles that bit into the soft ground.<br />I had on a new plaid skirt also that blew a little in the wind and<br />whenever this happened the red, white and blue banners in front of all<br />the houses stretched out stiff and said TUT-TUT-TUT-TUT in a disapproving<br />way.<br /><br />The largest of the banners and the largest of the lawns belonged to<br />Daisy Fay's house. She was just eighteen, two years older than me, and<br />by far the most popular of all the young girls in Louisville. She<br />dressed in white, and had a little white roadster and all day long<br />the telephone rang in her house and excited young officers from Camp<br />Taylor demanded the privilege of monopolizing her that night, "anyways,<br />for an hour!"<br /><br />When I came opposite her house that morning her white roadster was beside<br />the curb, and she was sitting in it with a lieutenant I had never seen<br />before. They were so engrossed in each other that she didn't see me until<br />I was five feet away.<br /><br />"Hello Jordan," she called unexpectedly. "Please come here."<br /><br />I was flattered that she wanted to speak to me, because of all the older<br />girls I admired her most. She asked me if I was going to the Red Cross and<br />make bandages. I was. Well, then, would I tell them that she couldn't come<br />that day? The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way<br />that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because it<br />seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since. His name<br />was Jay Gatsby and I didn't lay eyes on him again for over four<br />years--even after I'd met him on Long Island I didn't realize it was the<br />same man.<br /><br />That was nineteen-seventeen. By the next year I had a few beaux myself,<br />and I began to play in tournaments, so I didn't see Daisy very often.<br />She went with a slightly older crowd--when she went with anyone at all.<br />Wild rumors were circulating about her--how her mother had found her<br />packing her bag one winter night to go to New York and say goodbye to a<br />soldier who was going overseas. She was effectually prevented, but she<br />wasn't on speaking terms with her family for several weeks. After<br />that she didn't play around with the soldiers any more but only<br />with a few flat-footed, short-sighted young men in town who couldn't<br />get into the army at all.<br /><br />By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever. She had a debut<br />after the Armistice, and in February she was presumably engaged to a<br />man from New Orleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago with<br />more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before. He came<br />down with a hundred people in four private cars and hired a whole<br />floor of the Seelbach Hotel, and the day before the wedding he gave her<br />a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.<br /><br />I was bridesmaid. I came into her room half an hour before the bridal<br />dinner, and found her lying on her bed as lovely as the June night in<br />her flowered dress--and as drunk as a monkey. She had a bottle of<br />sauterne in one hand and a letter in the other.<br /><br />" 'Gratulate me," she muttered. "Never had a drink before but oh, how I do<br />enjoy it."<br /><br />"What's the matter, Daisy?"<br /><br />I was scared, I can tell you; I'd never seen a girl like that before.<br /><br />"Here, dearis." She groped around in a waste-basket she had with her<br />on the bed and pulled out the string of pearls. "Take 'em downstairs and<br />give 'em back to whoever they belong to. Tell 'em all Daisy's change' her<br />mine. Say 'Daisy's change' her mine!'."<br /><br />She began to cry--she cried and cried. I rushed out and found her<br />mother's maid and we locked the door and got her into a cold bath. She<br />wouldn't let go of the letter. She took it into the tub with her and<br />squeezed it up into a wet ball, and only let me leave it in the<br />soap dish when she saw that it was coming to pieces like snow.<br /><br />But she didn't say another word. We gave her spirits of ammonia and put<br />ice on her forehead and hooked her back into her dress and half an<br />hour later when we walked out of the room the pearls were around her<br />neck and the incident was over. Next day at five o'clock she married Tom<br />Buchanan without so much as a shiver and started off on a three months'<br />trip to the South Seas.<br /><br />I saw them in Santa Barbara when they came back and I thought I'd<br />never seen a girl so mad about her husband. If he left the room for a<br />minute she'd look around uneasily and say "Where's Tom gone?" and<br />wear the most abstracted expression until she saw him coming in the<br />door. She used to sit on the sand with his head in her lap by the hour<br />rubbing her fingers over his eyes and looking at him with unfathomable<br />delight. It was touching to see them together--it made you laugh in a<br />hushed, fascinated way. That was in August. A week after I left Santa<br />Barbara Tom ran into a wagon on the Ventura road one night and ripped<br />a front wheel off his car. The girl who was with him got into the<br />papers too because her arm was broken--she was one of the chambermaids<br />in the Santa Barbara Hotel.<br /><br />The next April Daisy had her little girl and they went to France for a<br />year. I saw them one spring in Cannes and later in Deauville and then<br />they came back to Chicago to settle down. Daisy was popular in Chicago,<br />as you know. They moved with a fast crowd, all of them young and rich<br />and wild, but she came out with an absolutely perfect reputation.<br />Perhaps because she doesn't drink. It's a great advantage not to drink<br />among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and, moreover,<br />you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else<br />is so blind that they don't see or care. Perhaps Daisy never went in<br />for amour at all--and yet there's something in that voice of hers. . . .<br /><br />Well, about six weeks ago, she heard the name Gatsby for the first time<br />in years. It was when I asked you--do you remember?--if you knew Gatsby<br />in West Egg. After you had gone home she came into my room and woke me<br />up, and said "What Gatsby?" and when I described him--I was half<br />asleep--she said in the strangest voice that it must be the man she used<br />to know. It wasn't until then that I connected this Gatsby with the<br />officer in her white car.<br /><br /><br />When Jordan Baker had finished telling all this we had left the Plaza<br />for half an hour and were driving in a Victoria through Central Park.<br />The sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in<br />the West Fifties and the clear voices of girls, already gathered like<br />crickets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight:<br /><br /><br /> "I'm the Sheik of Araby,<br /> Your love belongs to me.<br /> At night when you're are asleep,<br /> Into your tent I'll creep----"<br /><br /><br />"It was a strange coincidence," I said.<br /><br />"But it wasn't a coincidence at all."<br /><br />"Why not?"<br /><br />"Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay."<br /><br />Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired<br />on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the<br />womb of his purposeless splendor.<br /><br />"He wants to know--" continued Jordan "--if you'll invite Daisy to your<br />house some afternoon and then let him come over."<br /><br />The modesty of the demand shook me. He had waited five years and bought a<br />mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths so that he could<br />"come over" some afternoon to a stranger's garden.<br /><br />"Did I have to know all this before he could ask such a little thing?"<br /><br />"He's afraid. He's waited so long. He thought you might be offended.<br />You see he's a regular tough underneath it all."<br /><br />Something worried me.<br /><br />"Why didn't he ask you to arrange a meeting?"<br /><br />"He wants her to see his house," she explained. "And your house is right<br />next door."<br /><br />"Oh!"<br /><br />"I think he half expected her to wander into one of his parties,<br />some night," went on Jordan, "but she never did. Then he began asking<br />people casually if they knew her, and I was the first one he found.<br />It was that night he sent for me at his dance, and you should have<br />heard the elaborate way he worked up to it. Of course, I immediately<br />suggested a luncheon in New York--and I thought he'd go mad:<br /><br />" 'I don't want to do anything out of the way!' he kept saying. 'I want to<br />see her right next door.'<br /><br />"When I said you were a particular friend of Tom's he started to abandon<br />the whole idea. He doesn't know very much about Tom, though he says he's<br />read a Chicago paper for years just on the chance of catching a glimpse<br />of Daisy's name."<br /><br />It was dark now, and as we dipped under a little bridge I put my arm<br />around Jordan's golden shoulder and drew her toward me and asked her to<br />dinner. Suddenly I wasn't thinking of Daisy and Gatsby any more but of<br />this clean, hard, limited person who dealt in universal skepticism and<br />who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. A phrase began<br />to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: "There are only the<br />pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired."<br /><br />"And Daisy ought to have something in her life," murmured Jordan to me.<br /><br />"Does she want to see Gatsby?"<br /><br />"She's not to know about it. Gatsby doesn't want her to know. You're<br />just supposed to invite her to tea."<br /><br />We passed a barrier of dark trees, and then the facade of Fifty-ninth<br />Street, a block of delicate pale light, beamed down into the park.<br />Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied face<br />floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs and so I drew up the<br />girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan, scornful mouth smiled and so<br />I drew her up again, closer, this time to my face.<br /><br /></pre><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span>Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13783659974416042562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5033984040361137541.post-84311559548812143822007-02-06T07:00:00.000-08:002007-02-06T07:02:12.593-08:00Chapter 3<pre style="font-family: verdana;">There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In<br />his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the<br />whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the<br />afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft or<br />taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats<br />slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of<br />foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties<br />to and from the city, between nine in the morning and long past<br />midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to<br />meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants including an extra<br />gardener toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers<br />and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.<br /><br />Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer<br />in New York--every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back<br />door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the<br />kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an<br />hour, if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's<br />thumb.<br /><br />At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several<br />hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas<br />tree of Gatsby's enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with<br />glistening hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of<br />harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold.<br />In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked<br />with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of<br />his female guests were too young to know one from another.<br /><br />By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived--no thin five-piece affair<br />but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and<br />cornets and piccolos and low and high drums. The last swimmers have<br />come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from<br />New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and<br />salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors and hair shorn in<br />strange new ways and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The<br />bar is in full swing and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the<br />garden outside until the air is alive with chatter and laughter and<br />casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot and<br />enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names.<br /><br />The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun and<br />now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music and the opera of<br />voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier, minute by minute,<br />spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups<br />change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the<br />same breath--already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave<br />here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp,<br />joyous moment the center of a group and then excited with triumph<br />glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the<br />constantly changing light.<br /><br />Suddenly one of these gypsies in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out<br />of the air, dumps it down for courage and moving her hands like<br />Frisco dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the<br />orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her and there is a<br />burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda<br />Gray's understudy from the "Follies." The party has begun.<br /><br />I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby's house I was one of<br />the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not<br />invited--they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out<br />to Long Island and somehow they ended up at Gatsby's door. Once there<br />they were introduced by somebody who knew Gatsby and after that they<br />conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with<br />amusement parks. Sometimes they came and went without having met Gatsby<br />at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its own<br />ticket of admission.<br /><br />I had been actually invited. A chauffeur in a uniform of robin's egg<br />blue crossed my lawn early that Saturday morning with a surprisingly<br />formal note from his employer--the honor would be entirely Gatsby's, it<br />said, if I would attend his "little party" that night. He had<br />seen me several times and had intended to call on me long before<br />but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it--signed<br />Jay Gatsby in a majestic hand.<br /><br />Dressed up in white flannels I went over to his lawn a little after<br />seven and wandered around rather ill-at-ease among swirls and eddies<br />of people I didn't know--though here and there was a face I had noticed<br />on the commuting train. I was immediately struck by the number of young<br />Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry<br />and all talking in low earnest voices to solid and prosperous<br />Americans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or<br />insurance or automobiles. They were, at least, agonizingly aware of the<br />easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few<br />words in the right key.<br /><br />As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host but the two or<br />three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an<br />amazed way and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements<br />that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table--the only place<br />in the garden where a single man could linger without looking<br />purposeless and alone.<br /><br />I was on my way to get roaring drunk from sheer embarrassment when<br />Jordan Baker came out of the house and stood at the head of the marble<br />steps, leaning a little backward and looking with contemptuous interest<br />down into the garden.<br /><br />Welcome or not, I found it necessary to attach myself to someone<br />before I should begin to address cordial remarks to the passers-by.<br /><br />"Hello!" I roared, advancing toward her. My voice seemed unnaturally<br />loud across the garden.<br /><br />"I thought you might be here," she responded absently as I came up.<br />"I remembered you lived next door to----"<br /><br />She held my hand impersonally, as a promise that she'd take care<br />of me in a minute, and gave ear to two girls in twin yellow dresses<br />who stopped at the foot of the steps.<br /><br />"Hello!" they cried together. "Sorry you didn't win."<br /><br />That was for the golf tournament. She had lost in the finals the week<br />before.<br /><br />"You don't know who we are," said one of the girls in yellow, "but we<br />met you here about a month ago."<br /><br />"You've dyed your hair since then," remarked Jordan, and I started<br />but the girls had moved casually on and her remark was addressed to the<br />premature moon, produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a caterer's<br />basket. With Jordan's slender golden arm resting in mine we descended<br />the steps and sauntered about the garden. A tray of cocktails floated at<br />us through the twilight and we sat down at a table with the two girls in<br />yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble.<br /><br />"Do you come to these parties often?" inquired Jordan of the girl<br />beside her.<br /><br />"The last one was the one I met you at," answered the girl, in an alert,<br />confident voice. She turned to her companion: "Wasn't it for you,<br />Lucille?"<br /><br />It was for Lucille, too.<br /><br />"I like to come," Lucille said. "I never care what I do, so I always have<br />a good time. When I was here last I tore my gown on a chair, and he asked<br />me my name and address--inside of a week I got a package from Croirier's<br />with a new evening gown in it."<br /><br />"Did you keep it?" asked Jordan.<br /><br />"Sure I did. I was going to wear it tonight, but it was too big in the<br />bust and had to be altered. It was gas blue with lavender beads. Two<br />hundred and sixty-five dollars."<br /><br />"There's something funny about a fellow that'll do a thing like that,"<br />said the other girl eagerly. "He doesn't want any trouble with ANYbody."<br /><br />"Who doesn't?" I inquired.<br /><br />"Gatsby. Somebody told me----"<br /><br />The two girls and Jordan leaned together confidentially.<br /><br />"Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once."<br /><br />A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and<br />listened eagerly.<br /><br />"I don't think it's so much THAT," argued Lucille skeptically; "it's<br />more that he was a German spy during the war."<br /><br />One of the men nodded in confirmation.<br /><br />"I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in<br />Germany," he assured us positively.<br /><br />"Oh, no," said the first girl, "it couldn't be that, because he was in<br />the American army during the war." As our credulity switched back to<br />her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. "You look at him sometimes when<br />he thinks nobody's looking at him. I'll bet he killed a man."<br /><br />She narrowed her eyes and shivered. Lucille shivered. We all turned and<br />looked around for Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic speculation he<br />inspired that there were whispers about him from those who found little<br />that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.<br /><br />The first supper--there would be another one after midnight--was now<br />being served, and Jordan invited me to join her own party who were<br />spread around a table on the other side of the garden. There were<br />three married couples and Jordan's escort, a persistent undergraduate<br />given to violent innuendo and obviously under the impression<br />that sooner or later Jordan was going to yield him up her person<br />to a greater or lesser degree. Instead of rambling this party<br />had preserved a dignified homogeneity, and assumed to itself the<br />function of representing the staid nobility of the countryside--East<br />Egg condescending to West Egg, and carefully on guard against its<br />spectroscopic gayety.<br /><br />"Let's get out," whispered Jordan, after a somehow wasteful and<br />inappropriate half hour. "This is much too polite for me."<br /><br />We got up, and she explained that we were going to find the host--I<br />had never met him, she said, and it was making me uneasy. The<br />undergraduate nodded in a cynical, melancholy way.<br /><br />The bar, where we glanced first, was crowded but Gatsby was not there.<br />She couldn't find him from the top of the steps, and he wasn't on the<br />veranda. On a chance we tried an important-looking door, and walked<br />into a high Gothic library, panelled with carved English oak, and<br />probably transported complete from some ruin overseas.<br /><br />A stout, middle-aged man with enormous owl-eyed spectacles was<br />sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with<br />unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he<br />wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot.<br /><br />"What do you think?" he demanded impetuously.<br /><br />"About what?"<br /><br />He waved his hand toward the book-shelves.<br /><br />"About that. As a matter of fact you needn't bother to ascertain. I<br />ascertained. They're real."<br /><br />"The books?"<br /><br />He nodded.<br /><br />"Absolutely real--have pages and everything. I thought they'd be a nice<br />durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they're absolutely real. Pages<br />and--Here! Lemme show you."<br /><br />Taking our skepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and<br />returned with Volume One of the "Stoddard Lectures."<br /><br />"See!" he cried triumphantly. "It's a bona fide piece of printed matter.<br />It fooled me. This fella's a regular Belasco. It's a triumph. What<br />thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop too--didn't cut the pages.<br />But what do you want? What do you expect?"<br /><br />He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf<br />muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable<br />to collapse.<br /><br />"Who brought you?" he demanded. "Or did you just come? I was brought.<br />Most people were brought."<br /><br />Jordan looked at him alertly, cheerfully without answering.<br /><br />"I was brought by a woman named Roosevelt," he continued. "Mrs. Claud<br />Roosevelt. Do you know her? I met her somewhere last night. I've<br />been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me<br />up to sit in a library."<br /><br />"Has it?"<br /><br />"A little bit, I think. I can't tell yet. I've only been here<br />an hour. Did I tell you about the books? They're real. They're----"<br /><br />"You told us."<br /><br />We shook hands with him gravely and went back outdoors.<br /><br />There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden, old men pushing<br />young girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior couples<br />holding each other tortuously, fashionably and keeping in the<br />corners--and a great number of single girls dancing individualistically<br />or relieving the orchestra for a moment of the burden of the banjo or<br />the traps. By midnight the hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor had<br />sung in Italian and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz and between<br />the numbers people were doing "stunts" all over the garden, while happy<br />vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky. A pair of stage<br />"twins"--who turned out to be the girls in yellow--did a baby act in<br />costume and champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger bowls.<br />The moon had risen higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of<br />silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the<br />banjoes on the lawn.<br /><br />I was still with Jordan Baker. We were sitting at a table with a man of<br />about my age and a rowdy little girl who gave way upon the slightest<br />provocation to uncontrollable laughter. I was enjoying myself now. I<br />had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed<br />before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.<br /><br />At a lull in the entertainment the man looked at me and smiled.<br /><br />"Your face is familiar," he said, politely. "Weren't you in the Third<br />Division during the war?"<br /><br />"Why, yes. I was in the Ninth Machine-Gun Battalion."<br /><br />"I was in the Seventh Infantry until June nineteen-eighteen. I knew I'd<br />seen you somewhere before."<br /><br />We talked for a moment about some wet, grey little villages in France.<br />Evidently he lived in this vicinity for he told me that he had just<br />bought a hydroplane and was going to try it out in the morning.<br /><br />"Want to go with me, old sport? Just near the shore along the Sound."<br /><br />"What time?"<br /><br />"Any time that suits you best."<br /><br />It was on the tip of my tongue to ask his name when Jordan looked around<br />and smiled.<br /><br />"Having a gay time now?" she inquired.<br /><br />"Much better." I turned again to my new acquaintance. "This is an unusual<br />party for me. I haven't even seen the host. I live over there----" I waved<br />my hand at the invisible hedge in the distance, "and this man Gatsby sent<br />over his chauffeur with an invitation."<br /><br />For a moment he looked at me as if he failed to understand.<br /><br />"I'm Gatsby," he said suddenly.<br /><br />"What!" I exclaimed. "Oh, I beg your pardon."<br /><br />"I thought you knew, old sport. I'm afraid I'm not a very good host."<br /><br />He smiled understandingly--much more than understandingly. It was<br />one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance<br />in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or<br />seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then<br />concentrated on YOU with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It<br />understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in<br />you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it<br />had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to<br />convey. Precisely at that point it vanished--and I was looking at an<br />elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate<br />formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he<br />introduced himself I'd got a strong impression that he was picking his<br />words with care.<br /><br />Almost at the moment when Mr. Gatsby identified himself a butler<br />hurried toward him with the information that Chicago was calling him on<br />the wire. He excused himself with a small bow that included each of us<br />in turn.<br /><br />"If you want anything just ask for it, old sport," he urged me.<br />"Excuse me. I will rejoin you later."<br /><br />When he was gone I turned immediately to Jordan--constrained to assure her<br />of my surprise. I had expected that Mr. Gatsby would be a florid and<br />corpulent person in his middle years.<br /><br />"Who is he?" I demanded. "Do you know?"<br /><br />"He's just a man named Gatsby."<br /><br />"Where is he from, I mean? And what does he do?"<br /><br />"Now YOU're started on the subject," she answered with a wan smile.<br />"Well,--he told me once he was an Oxford man."<br /><br />A dim background started to take shape behind him but at her<br />next remark it faded away.<br /><br />"However, I don't believe it."<br /><br />"Why not?"<br /><br />"I don't know," she insisted, "I just don't think he went there."<br /><br />Something in her tone reminded me of the other girl's "I think<br />he killed a man," and had the effect of stimulating my curiosity. I<br />would have accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang<br />from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York.<br />That was comprehensible. But young men didn't--at least in my provincial<br />inexperience I believed they didn't--drift coolly out of nowhere and buy<br />a palace on Long Island Sound.<br /><br />"Anyhow he gives large parties," said Jordan, changing the subject<br />with an urbane distaste for the concrete. "And I like large parties.<br />They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy."<br /><br />There was the boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the orchestra leader<br />rang out suddenly above the echolalia of the garden.<br /><br />"Ladies and gentlemen," he cried. "At the request of Mr. Gatsby we are<br />going to play for you Mr. Vladimir Tostoff's latest work which attracted<br />so much attention at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the papers<br />you know there was a big sensation." He smiled with jovial condescension<br />and added "Some sensation!" whereupon everybody laughed.<br /><br />"The piece is known," he concluded lustily, "as 'Vladimir Tostoff's<br />Jazz History of the World.' "<br /><br />The nature of Mr. Tostoff's composition eluded me, because just as<br />it began my eyes fell on Gatsby, standing alone on the marble steps<br />and looking from one group to another with approving eyes.<br />His tanned skin was drawn attractively tight on his face and<br />his short hair looked as though it were trimmed every day. I could<br />see nothing sinister about him. I wondered if the fact that he was<br />not drinking helped to set him off from his guests, for it seemed<br />to me that he grew more correct as the fraternal hilarity increased.<br />When the "Jazz History of the World" was over girls were putting<br />their heads on men's shoulders in a puppyish, convivial way, girls were<br />swooning backward playfully into men's arms, even into groups knowing<br />that some one would arrest their falls--but no one swooned backward on<br />Gatsby and no French bob touched Gatsby's shoulder and no singing<br />quartets were formed with Gatsby's head for one link.<br /><br />"I beg your pardon."<br /><br />Gatsby's butler was suddenly standing beside us.<br /><br />"Miss Baker?" he inquired. "I beg your pardon but Mr. Gatsby would like<br />to speak to you alone."<br /><br />"With me?" she exclaimed in surprise.<br /><br />"Yes, madame."<br /><br />She got up slowly, raising her eyebrows at me in astonishment,<br />and followed the butler toward the house. I noticed that she wore<br />her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes--there<br />was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to<br />walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings.<br /><br />I was alone and it was almost two. For some time confused and<br />intriguing sounds had issued from a long many-windowed room which<br />overhung the terrace. Eluding Jordan's undergraduate who was now<br />engaged in an obstetrical conversation with two chorus girls, and who<br />implored me to join him, I went inside.<br /><br />The large room was full of people. One of the girls in yellow was<br />playing the piano and beside her stood a tall, red haired young lady<br />from a famous chorus, engaged in song. She had drunk a quantity of<br />champagne and during the course of her song she had decided ineptly<br />that everything was very very sad--she was not only singing, she was<br />weeping too. Whenever there was a pause in the song she filled it with<br />gasping broken sobs and then took up the lyric again in a quavering<br />soprano. The tears coursed down her cheeks--not freely, however, for when<br />they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an<br />inky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets. A<br />humorous suggestion was made that she sing the notes on her face<br />whereupon she threw up her hands, sank into a chair and went off into<br />a deep vinous sleep.<br /><br />"She had a fight with a man who says he's her husband," explained a<br />girl at my elbow.<br /><br />I looked around. Most of the remaining women were now having fights<br />with men said to be their husbands. Even Jordan's party, the quartet<br />from East Egg, were rent asunder by dissension. One of the men was<br />talking with curious intensity to a young actress, and his wife after<br />attempting to laugh at the situation in a dignified and indifferent<br />way broke down entirely and resorted to flank attacks--at intervals she<br />appeared suddenly at his side like an angry diamond, and hissed "You<br />promised!" into his ear.<br /><br />The reluctance to go home was not confined to wayward men. The hall was at<br />present occupied by two deplorably sober men and their highly indignant<br />wives. The wives were sympathizing with each other in slightly raised<br />voices.<br /><br />"Whenever he sees I'm having a good time he wants to go home."<br /><br />"Never heard anything so selfish in my life."<br /><br />"We're always the first ones to leave."<br /><br />"So are we."<br /><br />"Well, we're almost the last tonight," said one of the men sheepishly.<br />"The orchestra left half an hour ago."<br /><br />In spite of the wives' agreement that such malevolence was beyond<br />credibility, the dispute ended in a short struggle, and both wives were<br />lifted kicking into the night.<br /><br />As I waited for my hat in the hall the door of the library opened and<br />Jordan Baker and Gatsby came out together. He was saying some last word<br />to her but the eagerness in his manner tightened abruptly into<br />formality as several people approached him to say goodbye.<br /><br />Jordan's party were calling impatiently to her from the porch but she<br />lingered for a moment to shake hands.<br /><br />"I've just heard the most amazing thing," she whispered. "How long were<br />we in there?"<br /><br />"Why,--about an hour."<br /><br />"It was--simply amazing," she repeated abstractedly. "But I swore<br />I wouldn't tell it and here I am tantalizing you." She yawned<br />gracefully in my face. "Please come and see me. . . . Phone book.<br />. . . Under the name of Mrs. Sigourney Howard. . . . My aunt. . . ."<br />She was hurrying off as she talked--her brown hand waved a<br />jaunty salute as she melted into her party at the door.<br /><br />Rather ashamed that on my first appearance I had stayed so late, I<br />joined the last of Gatsby's guests who were clustered around him. I<br />wanted to explain that I'd hunted for him early in the evening and to<br />apologize for not having known him in the garden.<br /><br />"Don't mention it," he enjoined me eagerly. "Don't give it another<br />thought, old sport." The familiar expression held no more familiarity<br />than the hand which reassuringly brushed my shoulder. "And don't forget<br />we're going up in the hydroplane tomorrow morning at nine o'clock."<br /><br />Then the butler, behind his shoulder:<br /><br />"Philadelphia wants you on the phone, sir."<br /><br />"All right, in a minute. Tell them I'll be right there. . . . good<br />night."<br /><br />"Good night."<br /><br />"Good night." He smiled--and suddenly there seemed to be a pleasant<br />significance in having been among the last to go, as if he had desired<br />it all the time. "Good night, old sport. . . . Good night."<br /><br />But as I walked down the steps I saw that the evening was not quite over.<br />Fifty feet from the door a dozen headlights illuminated a bizarre and<br />tumultuous scene. In the ditch beside the road, right side up but<br />violently shorn of one wheel, rested a new coupé which had left Gatsby's<br />drive not two minutes before. The sharp jut of a wall accounted for the<br />detachment of the wheel which was now getting considerable attention from<br />half a dozen curious chauffeurs. However, as they had left their cars<br />blocking the road a harsh discordant din from those in the rear had been<br />audible for some time and added to the already violent confusion of<br />the scene.<br /><br />A man in a long duster had dismounted from the wreck and now stood in<br />the middle of the road, looking from the car to the tire and from the<br />tire to the observers in a pleasant, puzzled way.<br /><br />"See!" he explained. "It went in the ditch."<br /><br />The fact was infinitely astonishing to him--and I recognized first the<br />unusual quality of wonder and then the man--it was the late patron of<br />Gatsby's library.<br /><br />"How'd it happen?"<br /><br />He shrugged his shoulders.<br /><br />"I know nothing whatever about mechanics," he said decisively.<br /><br />"But how did it happen? Did you run into the wall?"<br /><br />"Don't ask me," said Owl Eyes, washing his hands of the whole matter.<br />"I know very little about driving--next to nothing. It happened,<br />and that's all I know."<br /><br />"Well, if you're a poor driver you oughtn't to try driving at night."<br /><br />"But I wasn't even trying," he explained indignantly, "I wasn't even<br />trying."<br /><br />An awed hush fell upon the bystanders.<br /><br />"Do you want to commit suicide?"<br /><br />"You're lucky it was just a wheel! A bad driver and not even TRYing!"<br /><br />"You don't understand," explained the criminal. "I wasn't driving. There's<br />another man in the car."<br /><br />The shock that followed this declaration found voice in a sustained<br />"Ah-h-h!" as the door of the coupé swung slowly open. The crowd--it was<br />now a crowd--stepped back involuntarily and when the door had opened wide<br />there was a ghostly pause. Then, very gradually, part by part, a pale<br />dangling individual stepped out of the wreck, pawing tentatively at the<br />ground with a large uncertain dancing shoe.<br /><br />Blinded by the glare of the headlights and confused by the incessant<br />groaning of the horns the apparition stood swaying for a moment before<br />he perceived the man in the duster.<br /><br />"Wha's matter?" he inquired calmly. "Did we run outa gas?"<br /><br />"Look!"<br /><br />Half a dozen fingers pointed at the amputated wheel--he stared<br />at it for a moment and then looked upward as though he suspected that<br />it had dropped from the sky.<br /><br />"It came off," some one explained.<br /><br />He nodded.<br /><br />"At first I din' notice we'd stopped."<br /><br />A pause. Then, taking a long breath and straightening his shoulders<br />he remarked in a determined voice:<br /><br />"Wonder'ff tell me where there's a gas'line station?"<br /><br />At least a dozen men, some of them little better off than he was,<br />explained to him that wheel and car were no longer joined by any physical<br />bond.<br /><br />"Back out," he suggested after a moment. "Put her in reverse."<br /><br />"But the WHEEL'S off!"<br /><br />He hesitated.<br /><br />"No harm in trying," he said.<br /><br />The caterwauling horns had reached a crescendo and I turned away and<br />cut across the lawn toward home. I glanced back once. A wafer of a moon<br />was shining over Gatsby's house, making the night fine as before and<br />surviving the laughter and the sound of his still glowing garden. A<br />sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great<br />doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host who<br />stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.<br /><br /><br />Reading over what I have written so far I see I have given the<br />impression that the events of three nights several weeks apart were all<br />that absorbed me. On the contrary they were merely casual events in a<br />crowded summer and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less<br />than my personal affairs.<br /><br />Most of the time I worked. In the early morning the sun threw my shadow<br />westward as I hurried down the white chasms of lower New York to the<br />Probity Trust. I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by their<br />first names and lunched with them in dark crowded restaurants on<br />little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee. I even had a short<br />affair with a girl who lived in Jersey City and worked in the<br />accounting department, but her brother began throwing mean looks in my<br />direction so when she went on her vacation in July I let it blow<br />quietly away.<br /><br />I took dinner usually at the Yale Club--for some reason it was the<br />gloomiest event of my day--and then I went upstairs to the library and<br />studied investments and securities for a conscientious hour.<br />There were generally a few rioters around but they never came into the<br />library so it was a good place to work. After that, if the night was<br />mellow I strolled down Madison Avenue past the old Murray Hill Hotel<br />and over Thirty-third Street to the Pennsylvania Station.<br /><br />I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night<br />and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and<br />machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and<br />pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few<br />minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever<br />know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their<br />apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled<br />back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the<br />enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes,<br />and felt it in others--poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows<br />waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner--young clerks<br />in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.<br /><br />Again at eight o'clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were five<br />deep with throbbing taxi cabs, bound for the theatre district, I felt a<br />sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited,<br />and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted<br />cigarettes outlined unintelligible gestures inside. Imagining that<br />I, too, was hurrying toward gayety and sharing their intimate<br />excitement, I wished them well.<br /><br />For a while I lost sight of Jordan Baker, and then in midsummer I found<br />her again. At first I was flattered to go places with her because she<br />was a golf champion and every one knew her name. Then it was<br />something more. I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of<br />tender curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the<br />world concealed something--most affectations conceal something<br />eventually, even though they don't in the beginning--and one day I found<br />what it was. When we were on a house-party together up in Warwick, she<br />left a borrowed car out in the rain with the top down, and then lied<br />about it--and suddenly I remembered the story about her that had eluded<br />me that night at Daisy's. At her first big golf tournament there was a<br />row that nearly reached the newspapers--a suggestion that she had moved<br />her ball from a bad lie in the semi-final round. The thing approached<br />the proportions of a scandal--then died away. A caddy retracted his<br />statement and the only other witness admitted that he might have been<br />mistaken. The incident and the name had remained together in my mind.<br /><br />Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever shrewd men and now I saw<br />that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence<br />from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest.<br />She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage, and given this<br />unwillingness I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she<br />was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the<br />world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard jaunty body.<br /><br />It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never<br />blame deeply--I was casually sorry, and then I forgot. It was on that<br />same house party that we had a curious conversation about driving a<br />car. It started because she passed so close to some workmen that our<br />fender flicked a button on one man's coat.<br /><br />"You're a rotten driver," I protested. "Either you ought to be more<br />careful or you oughtn't to drive at all."<br /><br />"I am careful."<br /><br />"No, you're not."<br /><br />"Well, other people are," she said lightly.<br /><br />"What's that got to do with it?"<br /><br />"They'll keep out of my way," she insisted. "It takes two to make an<br />accident."<br /><br />"Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself."<br /><br />"I hope I never will," she answered. "I hate careless people. That's why<br />I like you."<br /><br />Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had<br />deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved<br />her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes<br />on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of<br />that tangle back home. I'd been writing letters once a week and signing<br />them: "Love, Nick," and all I could think of was how, when that certain<br />girl played tennis, a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on her<br />upper lip. Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that had to be<br />tactfully broken off before I was free.<br /><br />Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and<br />this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.<br /><br /></pre><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span>Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13783659974416042562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5033984040361137541.post-76356255805090944702007-02-06T06:49:00.000-08:002007-02-06T06:57:06.996-08:00Chapter 2<pre style="font-family: verdana;">About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily<br />joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to<br />shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of<br />ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and<br />hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and<br />chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of<br />men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.<br />Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives<br />out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey<br />men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud<br />which screens their obscure operations from your sight.<br /><br />But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift<br />endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T.<br />J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and<br />gigantic--their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but,<br />instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a<br />nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to<br />fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself<br />into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes,<br />dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over<br />the solemn dumping ground.<br /><br />The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and<br />when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on<br />waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an<br />hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was<br />because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan's mistress.<br /><br />The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His<br />acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular<br />restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about,<br />chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her I<br />had no desire to meet her--but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on<br />the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped<br />to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the<br />car.<br /><br />"We're getting off!" he insisted. "I want you to meet my girl."<br /><br />I think he'd tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to<br />have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that<br />on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do.<br /><br />I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked<br />back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg's persistent<br />stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick<br />sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street<br />ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the<br />three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night<br />restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a<br />garage--Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars Bought and Sold--and I followed<br />Tom inside.<br /><br />The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the<br />dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had<br />occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that<br />sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the<br />proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands<br />on a piece of waste. He was a blonde, spiritless man, anaemic, and<br />faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his<br />light blue eyes.<br /><br />"Hello, Wilson, old man," said Tom, slapping him jovially on the<br />shoulder. "How's business?"<br /><br />"I can't complain," answered Wilson unconvincingly. "When are you going<br />to sell me that car?"<br /><br />"Next week; I've got my man working on it now."<br /><br />"Works pretty slow, don't he?"<br /><br />"No, he doesn't," said Tom coldly. "And if you feel that way about it,<br />maybe I'd better sell it somewhere else after all."<br /><br />"I don't mean that," explained Wilson quickly. "I just meant----"<br /><br />His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage. Then<br />I heard footsteps on a stairs and in a moment the thickish figure of a<br />woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle<br />thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously<br />as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue<br />crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty but there was an<br />immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body<br />were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and walking through her<br />husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in<br />the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her<br />husband in a soft, coarse voice:<br /><br />"Get some chairs, why don't you, so somebody can sit down."<br /><br />"Oh, sure," agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office,<br />mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen<br />dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in<br />the vicinity--except his wife, who moved close to Tom.<br /><br />"I want to see you," said Tom intently. "Get on the next train."<br /><br />"All right."<br /><br />"I'll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level."<br /><br />She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson<br />emerged with two chairs from his office door.<br /><br />We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before<br />the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was setting<br />torpedoes in a row along the railroad track.<br /><br />"Terrible place, isn't it," said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor<br />Eckleburg.<br /><br />"Awful."<br /><br />"It does her good to get away."<br /><br />"Doesn't her husband object?"<br /><br />"Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so dumb<br />he doesn't know he's alive."<br /><br />So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up together to New York--or not<br />quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom<br />deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be<br />on the train.<br /><br />She had changed her dress to a brown figured muslin which stretched<br />tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in<br />New York. At the news-stand she bought a copy of "Town Tattle" and a<br />moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream<br />and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echoing drive<br />she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one,<br />lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the<br />mass of the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she<br />turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the<br />front glass.<br /><br />"I want to get one of those dogs," she said earnestly. "I want to get one<br />for the apartment. They're nice to have--a dog."<br /><br />We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd resemblance to John<br />D. Rockefeller. In a basket, swung from his neck, cowered a dozen very<br />recent puppies of an indeterminate breed.<br /><br />"What kind are they?" asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly as he came to the<br />taxi-window.<br /><br />"All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?"<br /><br />"I'd like to get one of those police dogs; I don't suppose you got that<br />kind?"<br /><br />The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew<br />one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck.<br /><br />"That's no police dog," said Tom.<br /><br />"No, it's not exactly a polICE dog," said the man with disappointment<br />in his voice. "It's more of an airedale." He passed his hand over the<br />brown wash-rag of a back. "Look at that coat. Some coat. That's a dog<br />that'll never bother you with catching cold."<br /><br />"I think it's cute," said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. "How much is it?"<br /><br />"That dog?" He looked at it admiringly. "That dog will cost you ten<br />dollars."<br /><br />The airedale--undoubtedly there was an airedale concerned in it somewhere<br />though its feet were startlingly white--changed hands and settled down<br />into Mrs. Wilson's lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with<br />rapture.<br /><br />"Is it a boy or a girl?" she asked delicately.<br /><br />"That dog? That dog's a boy."<br /><br />"It's a bitch," said Tom decisively. "Here's your money. Go and buy ten<br />more dogs with it."<br /><br />We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the<br />summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a great<br />flock of white sheep turn the corner.<br /><br />"Hold on," I said, "I have to leave you here."<br /><br />"No, you don't," interposed Tom quickly. "Myrtle'll be hurt if you don't<br />come up to the apartment. Won't you,<br />Myrtle?"<br /><br />"Come on," she urged. "I'll telephone my sister Catherine. She's said to<br />be very beautiful by people who ought to know."<br /><br />"Well, I'd like to, but----"<br /><br />We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds.<br />At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of<br />apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the<br />neighborhood, Mrs. Wilson gathered up her dog and her other purchases<br />and went haughtily in.<br /><br />"I'm going to have the McKees come up," she announced as we rose in the<br />elevator. "And of course I got to call up my sister, too."<br /><br />The apartment was on the top floor--a small living room, a small<br />dining room, a small bedroom and a bath. The living room was crowded to<br />the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it<br />so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of<br />ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was<br />an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred<br />rock. Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself<br />into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down<br />into the room. Several old copies of "Town Tattle "lay on the table<br />together with a copy of "Simon Called Peter" and some of the small<br />scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with<br />the dog. A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and<br />some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large<br />hard dog biscuits--one of which decomposed apathetically in the saucer<br />of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey<br />from a locked bureau door.<br /><br />I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that<br />afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it<br />although until after eight o'clock the apartment was full of cheerful<br />sun. Sitting on Tom's lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the<br />telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at<br />the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had disappeared so<br />I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of "Simon<br />Called Peter"--either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted<br />things because it didn't make any sense to me.<br /><br />Just as Tom and Myrtle--after the first drink Mrs. Wilson and I called<br />each other by our first names--reappeared, company commenced to arrive<br />at the apartment door.<br /><br />The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty<br />with a solid sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky<br />white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more<br />rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the<br />old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about<br />there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets<br />jingled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary<br />haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered<br />if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated<br />my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel.<br /><br />Mr. McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below. He had just<br />shaved for there was a white spot of lather on his cheekbone and he<br />was most respectful in his greeting to everyone in the room. He<br />informed me that he was in the "artistic game" and I gathered later<br />that he was a photographer and had made the dim enlargement of Mrs.<br />Wilson's mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall. His wife<br />was shrill, languid, handsome and horrible. She told me with pride<br />that her husband had photographed her a hundred and twenty-seven times<br />since they had been married.<br /><br />Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time before and was now<br />attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream colored chiffon, which<br />gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room.<br />With the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a<br />change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage<br />was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her<br />assertions became more violently affected moment by moment and as she<br />expanded the room grew smaller around her until she seemed to be<br />revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.<br /><br />"My dear," she told her sister in a high mincing shout, "most of these<br />fellas will cheat you every time. All they think of is money. I had a<br />woman up here last week to look at my feet and when she gave me the<br />bill you'd of thought she had my appendicitus out."<br /><br />"What was the name of the woman?" asked Mrs. McKee.<br /><br />"Mrs. Eberhardt. She goes around looking at people's feet in their own<br />homes."<br /><br />"I like your dress," remarked Mrs. McKee, "I think it's adorable."<br /><br />Mrs. Wilson rejected the compliment by raising her eyebrow in disdain.<br /><br />"It's just a crazy old thing," she said. "I just slip it on sometimes when<br />I don't care what I look like."<br /><br />"But it looks wonderful on you, if you know what I mean," pursued<br />Mrs. McKee. "If Chester could only get you in that pose I think he could<br />make something of it."<br /><br />We all looked in silence at Mrs. Wilson who removed a strand of hair from<br />over her eyes and looked back at us with a brilliant smile. Mr. McKee<br />regarded her intently with his head on one side and then moved his hand<br />back and forth slowly in front of his face.<br /><br />"I should change the light," he said after a moment. "I'd like to bring<br />out the modelling of the features. And I'd try to get hold of all the<br />back hair."<br /><br />"I wouldn't think of changing the light," cried Mrs. McKee. "I think<br />it's----"<br /><br />Her husband said "SH!" and we all looked at the subject again whereupon<br />Tom Buchanan yawned audibly and got to his feet.<br /><br />"You McKees have something to drink," he said. "Get some more ice and<br />mineral water, Myrtle, before everybody goes to sleep."<br /><br />"I told that boy about the ice." Myrtle raised her eyebrows in despair<br />at the shiftlessness of the lower orders. "These people! You have to keep<br />after them all the time."<br /><br />She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to the<br />dog, kissed it with ecstasy and swept into the kitchen, implying that<br />a dozen chefs awaited her orders there.<br /><br />"I've done some nice things out on Long Island," asserted Mr. McKee.<br /><br />Tom looked at him blankly.<br /><br />"Two of them we have framed downstairs."<br /><br />"Two what?" demanded Tom.<br /><br />"Two studies. One of them I call 'Montauk Point--the Gulls,' and the<br />other I call 'Montauk Point--the Sea.' "<br /><br />The sister Catherine sat down beside me on the couch.<br /><br />"Do you live down on Long Island, too?" she inquired.<br /><br />"I live at West Egg."<br /><br />"Really? I was down there at a party about a month ago. At a man named<br />Gatsby's. Do you know him?"<br /><br />"I live next door to him."<br /><br />"Well, they say he's a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm's. That's<br />where all his money comes from."<br /><br />"Really?"<br /><br />She nodded.<br /><br />"I'm scared of him. I'd hate to have him get anything on me."<br /><br />This absorbing information about my neighbor was interrupted by<br />Mrs. McKee's pointing suddenly at Catherine:<br /><br />"Chester, I think you could do something with HER," she broke out,<br />but Mr. McKee only nodded in a bored way and turned his attention<br />to Tom.<br /><br />"I'd like to do more work on Long Island if I could get the entry. All<br />I ask is that they should give me a start."<br /><br />"Ask Myrtle," said Tom, breaking into a short shout of laughter as<br />Mrs. Wilson entered with a tray. "She'll give you a letter of<br />introduction, won't you, Myrtle?"<br /><br />"Do what?" she asked, startled.<br /><br />"You'll give McKee a letter of introduction to your husband, so he can<br />do some studies of him." His lips moved silently for a moment as he<br />invented. " 'George B. Wilson at the Gasoline Pump,' or something like<br />that."<br /><br /><br />Catherine leaned close to me and whispered in my ear: "Neither of them<br />can stand the person they're married to."<br /><br />"Can't they?"<br /><br />"Can't STAND them." She looked at Myrtle and then at Tom. "What I say is,<br />why go on living with them if they can't stand them? If I was them I'd get<br />a divorce and get married to each other right away."<br /><br />"Doesn't she like Wilson either?"<br /><br />The answer to this was unexpected. It came from Myrtle who had overheard<br />the question and it was violent and obscene.<br /><br />"You see?" cried Catherine triumphantly. She lowered her voice again.<br />"It's really his wife that's keeping them apart. She's a Catholic and<br />they don't believe in divorce."<br /><br />Daisy was not a Catholic and I was a little shocked at the elaborateness<br />of the lie.<br /><br />"When they do get married," continued Catherine, "they're going west to<br />live for a while until it blows over."<br /><br />"It'd be more discreet to go to Europe."<br /><br />"Oh, do you like Europe?" she exclaimed surprisingly. "I just got back<br />from Monte Carlo."<br /><br />"Really."<br /><br />"Just last year. I went over there with another girl."<br /><br />"Stay long?"<br /><br />"No, we just went to Monte Carlo and back. We went by way of Marseilles.<br />We had over twelve hundred dollars when we started but we got gypped<br />out of it all in two days in the private rooms. We had an awful time<br />getting back, I can tell you. God, how I hated that town!"<br /><br />The late afternoon sky bloomed in the window for a moment like the blue<br />honey of the Mediterranean--then the shrill voice of Mrs. McKee called me<br />back into the room.<br /><br />"I almost made a mistake, too," she declared vigorously. "I almost<br />married a little kyke who'd been after me for years. I knew he was<br />below me. Everybody kept saying to me: 'Lucille, that man's way below<br />you!' But if I hadn't met Chester, he'd of got me sure."<br /><br />"Yes, but listen," said Myrtle Wilson, nodding her head up and down,<br />"at least you didn't marry him."<br /><br />"I know I didn't."<br /><br />"Well, I married him," said Myrtle, ambiguously. "And that's the<br />difference between your case and mine."<br /><br />"Why did you, Myrtle?" demanded Catherine. "Nobody forced you to."<br /><br />Myrtle considered.<br /><br />"I married him because I thought he was a gentleman," she said finally.<br />"I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn't fit to lick<br />my shoe."<br /><br />"You were crazy about him for a while," said Catherine.<br /><br />"Crazy about him!" cried Myrtle incredulously. "Who said I was crazy about<br />him? I never was any more crazy about him than I was about that man<br />there."<br /><br />She pointed suddenly at me, and every one looked at me accusingly.<br />I tried to show by my expression that I had played no part in her past.<br /><br />"The only CRAZY I was was when I married him. I knew right away I made a<br />mistake. He borrowed somebody's best suit to get married in and never<br />even told me about it, and the man came after it one day when he was out.<br />She looked around to see who was listening: " 'Oh, is that your suit?' I<br />said.<br />'This is the first I ever heard about it.' But I gave it to him and then I<br />lay down<br />and cried to beat the band all afternoon."<br /><br />"She really ought to get away from him," resumed Catherine to me.<br />"They've been living over that garage for eleven years. And Tom's the<br />first sweetie she ever had."<br /><br />The bottle of whiskey--a second one--was now in constant demand by all<br />present, excepting Catherine who "felt just as good on nothing at all."<br />Tom rang for the janitor and sent him for some celebrated sandwiches,<br />which were a complete supper in themselves. I wanted to get out and walk<br />eastward toward the park through the soft twilight but each time I tried<br />to go I became entangled in some wild strident argument which pulled me<br />back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of<br />yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the<br />casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and<br />wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled<br />by the inexhaustible variety of life.<br /><br />Myrtle pulled her chair close to mine, and suddenly her warm breath<br />poured over me the story of her first meeting with Tom.<br /><br />"It was on the two little seats facing each other that are always the<br />last ones left on the train. I was going up to New York to see my<br />sister and spend the night. He had on a dress suit and patent leather<br />shoes and I couldn't keep my eyes off him but every time he looked at<br />me I had to pretend to be looking at the advertisement over his head.<br />When we came into the station he was next to me and his white<br />shirt-front pressed against my arm--and so I told him I'd have to call<br />a policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so excited that when I got into<br />a taxi with him I didn't hardly know I wasn't getting into a subway<br />train. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live<br />forever, you can't live forever.' "<br /><br />She turned to Mrs. McKee and the room rang full of her artificial<br />laughter.<br /><br />"My dear," she cried, "I'm going to give you this dress as soon as I'm<br />through with it. I've got to get another one tomorrow. I'm going to<br />make a list of all the things I've got to get. A massage and a wave<br />and a collar for the dog and one of those cute little ash-trays where<br />you touch a spring, and a wreath with a black silk bow for mother's<br />grave that'll last all summer. I got to write down a list so I won't<br />forget all the things I got to do."<br /><br />It was nine o'clock--almost immediately afterward I looked at my watch<br />and found it was ten. Mr. McKee was asleep on a chair with his fists<br />clenched in his lap, like a photograph of a man of action. Taking out my<br />handkerchief I wiped from his cheek the remains of the spot of dried<br />lather that had worried me all the afternoon.<br /><br />The little dog was sitting on the table looking with blind eyes through<br />the smoke and from time to time groaning faintly. People disappeared,<br />reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other,<br />searched for each other, found each other a few feet away. Some time<br />toward midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood face to face<br />discussing in impassioned voices whether Mrs. Wilson had any right to<br />mention Daisy's name.<br /><br />"Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!" shouted Mrs. Wilson. "I'll say it whenever I want<br />to! Daisy! Dai----"<br /><br />Making a short deft movement Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his<br />open hand.<br /><br />Then there were bloody towels upon the bathroom floor, and women's<br />voices scolding, and high over the confusion a long broken wail of<br />pain. Mr. McKee awoke from his doze and started in a daze toward the door.<br />When he had gone half way he turned around and stared at the scene--his<br />wife and Catherine scolding and consoling as they stumbled here and<br />there among the crowded furniture with articles of aid, and the<br />despairing figure on the couch bleeding fluently and trying to spread<br />a copy of "Town Tattle" over the tapestry scenes of Versailles.<br />Then Mr. McKee turned and continued on out the door. Taking my hat from<br />the chandelier I followed.<br /><br />"Come to lunch some day," he suggested, as we groaned down in the<br />elevator.<br /><br />"Where?"<br /><br />"Anywhere."<br /><br />"Keep your hands off the lever," snapped the elevator boy.<br /><br />"I beg your pardon," said Mr. McKee with dignity, "I didn't know I was<br />touching it."<br /><br />"All right," I agreed, "I'll be glad to."<br /><br />. . . I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the<br />sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.<br /><br />"Beauty and the Beast . . . Loneliness . . . Old Grocery Horse . . .<br />Brook'n Bridge . . . ."<br /><br />Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania<br />Station, staring at the morning "Tribune" and waiting for the four<br />o'clock train.<br /></pre><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span>Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13783659974416042562noreply@blogger.com0