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