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+
+                                 VII
+
+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 tomorrow? 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
+pocketbook 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 everyone 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 anyone should care in this heat whose flushed lips he kissed,
+whose head made damp the pyjama pocket over his heart!
+
+… Through the hall of the Buchanans’ house blew a faint wind, carrying
+the sound of the telephone bell out to Gatsby and me as we waited at
+the door.
+
+“The master’s body?” roared the butler into the mouthpiece. “I’m
+sorry, madame, but we can’t furnish it—it’s far too hot to touch this
+noon!”
+
+What he really said was: “Yes … Yes … I’ll see.”
+
+He set down the receiver and came toward us, glistening slightly, to
+take our stiff straw hats.
+
+“Madame expects you in the salon!” he cried, needlessly indicating the
+direction. In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the
+common store of life.
+
+The room, shadowed well with awnings, was dark and cool. Daisy and
+Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols weighing down
+their own white dresses against the singing breeze of the fans.
+
+“We can’t move,” they said together.
+
+Jordan’s fingers, powdered white over their tan, rested for a moment
+in mine.
+
+“And Mr. Thomas Buchanan, the athlete?” I inquired.
+
+Simultaneously I heard his voice, gruff, muffled, husky, at the hall
+telephone.
+
+Gatsby stood in the centre of the crimson carpet and gazed around with
+fascinated eyes. Daisy watched him and laughed, her sweet, exciting
+laugh; a tiny gust of powder rose from her bosom into the air.
+
+“The rumour is,” whispered Jordan, “that that’s Tom’s girl on the
+telephone.”
+
+We were silent. The voice in the hall rose high with annoyance: “Very
+well, then, I won’t sell you the car at all … I’m under no obligations
+to you at all … and as for your bothering me about it at lunch time, I
+won’t stand that at all!”
+
+“Holding down the receiver,” said Daisy cynically.
+
+“No, he’s not,” I assured her. “It���s a bona-fide deal. I happen to
+know about it.”
+
+Tom flung open the door, blocked out its space for a moment with his
+thick body, and hurried into the room.
+
+“Mr. Gatsby!” He put out his broad, flat hand with well-concealed
+dislike. “I’m glad to see you, sir … Nick …”
+
+“Make us a cold drink,” cried Daisy.
+
+As he left the room again she got up and went over to Gatsby and
+pulled his face down, kissing him on the mouth.
+
+“You know I love you,” she murmured.
+
+“You forget there’s a lady present,” said Jordan.
+
+Daisy looked around doubtfully.
+
+“You kiss Nick too.”
+
+“What a low, vulgar girl!”
+
+“I don’t care!” cried Daisy, and began to clog on the brick fireplace.
+Then she remembered the heat and sat down guiltily on the couch just
+as a freshly laundered nurse leading a little girl came into the room.
+
+“Bles-sed pre-cious,” she crooned, holding out her arms. “Come to your
+own mother that loves you.”
+
+The child, relinquished by the nurse, rushed across the room and
+rooted shyly into her mother’s dress.
+
+“The bles-sed pre-cious! Did mother get powder on your old yellowy
+hair? Stand up now, and say—How-de-do.”
+
+Gatsby and I in turn leaned down and took the small reluctant hand.
+Afterward he kept looking at the child with surprise. I don’t think he
+had ever really believed in its existence before.
+
+“I got dressed before luncheon,” said the child, turning eagerly to
+Daisy.
+
+“That’s because your mother wanted to show you off.” Her face bent
+into the single wrinkle of the small white neck. “You dream, you. You
+absolute little dream.”
+
+“Yes,” admitted the child calmly. “Aunt Jordan’s got on a white dress
+too.”
+
+“How do you like mother’s friends?” Daisy turned her around so that
+she faced Gatsby. “Do you think they’re pretty?”
+
+“Where’s Daddy?”
+
+“She doesn’t look like her father,” explained Daisy. “She looks like
+me. She’s got my hair and shape of the face.”
+
+Daisy sat back upon the couch. The nurse took a step forward and held
+out her hand.
+
+“Come, Pammy.”
+
+“Goodbye, 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 alongshore. 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 gaiety with the cold ale.
+
+“What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon?” cried Daisy, “and the
+day after that, and the next thirty years?”
+
+“Don’t be morbid,” Jordan said. “Life starts all over again when it
+gets crisp in the fall.”
+
+“But it’s so hot,” insisted Daisy, on the verge of tears, “and
+everything’s so confused. Let’s all go to town!”
+
+Her voice struggled on through the heat, beating against it, moulding
+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 someone 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 anyone smoke a cigarette first?”
+
+“Everybody smoked all through lunch.”
+
+“Oh, let’s have fun,” she begged him. “It’s too hot to fuss.”
+
+He didn’t answer.
+
+“Have it your own way,” she said. “Come on, Jordan.”
+
+They went upstairs 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 whisky,” answered Tom. He went inside.
+
+Gatsby turned to me rigidly:
+
+“I can’t say anything in his house, old sport.”
+
+“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of—” I
+hesitated.
+
+“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.
+
+That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that
+was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of
+it, the cymbals’ song of it … High in a white palace the king’s
+daughter, the golden girl …
+
+Tom came out of the house wrapping a quart bottle in a towel, followed
+by Daisy and Jordan wearing small tight hats of metallic cloth and
+carrying light capes over their arms.
+
+“Shall we all go in my car?” suggested Gatsby. He felt the hot, green
+leather of the seat. “I ought to have left it in the shade.”
+
+“Is it standard shift?” demanded Tom.
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Well, you take my coupé 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 drugstore. You can buy anything at a
+drugstore 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 coupé.”
+
+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 theoretical abyss.
+
+“I’ve made a small investigation of this fellow,” he continued. “I
+could have gone deeper if I’d known—”
+
+“Do you mean you’ve been to a medium?” inquired Jordan humorously.
+
+“What?” Confused, he stared at us as we laughed. “A medium?”
+
+“About Gatsby.”
+
+“About Gatsby! No, I haven’t. I said I’d been making a small
+investigation of his past.”
+
+“And you found he was an Oxford man,” said Jordan helpfully.
+
+“An Oxford man!” He was incredulous. “Like hell he is! He wears a pink
+suit.”
+
+“Nevertheless he’s an Oxford man.”
+
+“Oxford, New Mexico,” snorted Tom contemptuously, “or something like
+that.”
+
+“Listen, Tom. If you’re such a snob, why did you invite him to lunch?”
+demanded Jordan crossly.
+
+“Daisy invited him; she knew him before we were married—God knows
+where!”
+
+We were all irritable now with the fading ale, and aware of it we
+drove for a while in silence. Then as Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s faded
+eyes came into sight down the road, I remembered Gatsby’s caution
+about gasoline.
+
+“We’ve got enough to get us to town,” said Tom.
+
+“But there’s a garage right here,” objected Jordan. “I don’t want to
+get stalled in this baking heat.”
+
+Tom threw on both brakes impatiently, and we slid to an abrupt dusty
+stop under Wilson’s sign. After a moment the proprietor emerged from
+the interior of his establishment and gazed hollow-eyed at the car.
+
+“Let’s have some gas!” cried Tom roughly. “What do you think we
+stopped for—to admire the view?”
+
+“I’m sick,” said Wilson without moving. “Been sick all day.”
+
+“What’s the matter?”
+
+“I’m all run down.”
+
+“Well, shall I help myself?” Tom demanded. “You sounded well enough on
+the phone.”
+
+With an effort Wilson left the shade and support of the doorway and,
+breathing hard, unscrewed the cap of the tank. In the sunlight his
+face was green.
+
+“I didn’t mean to interrupt your lunch,” he said. “But I need money
+pretty bad, and I was wondering what you were going to do with your
+old car.”
+
+“How do you like this one?” inquired Tom. “I bought it last week.”
+
+“It’s a nice yellow one,” said Wilson, as he strained at the handle.
+
+“Like to buy it?”
+
+“Big chance,” Wilson smiled faintly. “No, but I could make some money
+on the other.”
+
+“What do you want money for, all of a sudden?”
+
+“I’ve been here too long. I want to get away. My wife and I want to go
+West.”
+
+“Your wife does,” exclaimed Tom, startled.
+
+“She’s been talking about it for ten years.” He rested for a moment
+against the pump, shading his eyes. “And now she’s going whether she
+wants to or not. I’m going to get her away.”
+
+The coupé flashed by us with a flurry of dust and the flash of a
+waving hand.
+
+“What do I owe you?” demanded Tom harshly.
+
+“I just got wised up to something funny the last two days,” remarked
+Wilson. “That’s why I want to get away. That’s why I been bothering
+you about the car.”
+
+“What do I owe you?”
+
+“Dollar twenty.”
+
+The relentless beating heat was beginning to confuse me and I had a
+bad moment there before I realized that so far his suspicions hadn’t
+alighted on Tom. He had discovered that Myrtle had some sort of life
+apart from him in another world, and the shock had made him physically
+sick. I stared at him and then at Tom, who had made a parallel
+discovery less than an hour before—and it occurred to me that there
+was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as
+the difference between the sick and the well. Wilson was so sick that
+he looked guilty, unforgivably guilty—as if he had just got some poor
+girl with child.
+
+“I’ll let you have that car,” said Tom. “I’ll send it over tomorrow
+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 ash-heaps the giant eyes of Doctor T. J.
+Eckleburg kept their vigil, but I perceived, after a moment, that
+other eyes were regarding us with peculiar intensity from less than
+twenty feet away.
+
+In one of the windows over the garage the curtains had been moved
+aside a little, and Myrtle Wilson was peering down at the car. So
+engrossed was she that she had no consciousness of being observed, and
+one emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a
+slowly developing picture. Her expression was curiously familiar—it
+was an expression I had often seen on women’s faces, but on Myrtle
+Wilson’s face it seemed purposeless and inexplicable until I realized
+that her eyes, wide with jealous terror, were fixed not on Tom, but on
+Jordan Baker, whom she took to be his wife.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind, and as we
+drove away Tom was feeling the hot whips of panic. His wife and his
+mistress, until an hour ago secure and inviolate, were slipping
+precipitately from his control. Instinct made him step on the
+accelerator with the double purpose of overtaking Daisy and leaving
+Wilson behind, and we sped along toward Astoria at fifty miles an
+hour, until, among the spidery girders of the elevated, we came in
+sight of the easygoing blue coupé.
+
+“Those big movies around Fiftieth Street are cool,” suggested
+Jordan. “I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone’s away.
+There’s something very sensuous about it—overripe, as if all sorts of
+funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.”
+
+The word “sensuous” had the effect of further disquieting Tom, but
+before he could invent a protest the coupé came to a stop, and Daisy
+signalled us to draw up alongside.
+
+“Where are we going?” she cried.
+
+“How about the movies?”
+
+“It’s so hot,” she complained. “You go. We’ll ride around and meet you
+after.” With an effort her wit rose faintly. “We’ll meet you on some
+corner. I’ll be the man smoking two cigarettes.”
+
+“We can’t argue about it here,” Tom said impatiently, as a truck gave
+out a cursing whistle behind us. “You follow me to the south side of
+Central Park, in front of the Plaza.”
+
+Several times he turned his head and looked back for their car, and if
+the traffic delayed them he slowed up until they came into sight. I
+think he was afraid they would dart down a side-street and out of his
+life forever.
+
+But they didn’t. And we all took the less explicable step of engaging
+the parlour 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
+bathrooms and take cold baths, and then assumed more tangible form as
+“a place to have a mint julep.” Each of us said over and over that it
+was a “crazy idea”—we all talked at once to a baffled clerk and
+thought, or pretended to think, that we were being very funny …
+
+The room was large and stifling, and, though it was already four
+o’clock, opening the windows admitted only a gust of hot shrubbery
+from the Park. Daisy went to the mirror and stood with her back to us,
+fixing her hair.
+
+“It’s a swell suite,” whispered Jordan respectfully, and everyone
+laughed.
+
+“Open another window,” commanded Daisy, without turning around.
+
+“There aren’t any more.”
+
+“Well, we’d better telephone for an axe—”
+
+“The thing to do is to forget about the heat,” said Tom impatiently.
+“You make it ten times worse by crabbing about it.”
+
+He unrolled the bottle of whisky from the towel and put it on the
+table.
+
+“Why not let her alone, old sport?” remarked Gatsby. “You’re the one
+that wanted to come to town.”
+
+There was a moment of silence. The telephone book slipped from its
+nail and splashed to the floor, whereupon Jordan whispered, “Excuse
+me”—but this time no one laughed.
+
+“I’ll pick it up,” I offered.
+
+“I’ve got it.” Gatsby examined the parted string, muttered “Hum!” in
+an interested way, and tossed the book on a chair.
+
+“That’s a great expression of yours, isn’t it?” said Tom sharply.
+
+“What is?”
+
+“All this ‘old sport’ business. Where’d you pick that up?”
+
+“Now see here, Tom,” said Daisy, turning around from the mirror, “if
+you’re going to make personal remarks I won’t stay here a minute.
+Call up and order some ice for the mint julep.”
+
+As Tom took up the receiver the compressed heat exploded into sound
+and we were listening to the portentous chords of Mendelssohn’s
+Wedding March from the ballroom below.
+
+“Imagine marrying anybody in this heat!” cried Jordan dismally.
+
+“Still—I was married in the middle of June,” Daisy remembered.
+“Louisville in June! Somebody fainted. Who was it fainted, Tom?”
+
+“Biloxi,” he answered shortly.
+
+“A man named Biloxi. ‘Blocks’ Biloxi, and he made boxes—that’s a
+fact—and he was from Biloxi, Tennessee.”
+
+“They carried him into my house,” appended Jordan, “because we lived
+just two doors from the church. And he stayed three weeks, until Daddy
+told him he had to get out. The day after he left Daddy died.”  After
+a moment she added. “There wasn’t any connection.”
+
+“I used to know a Bill Biloxi from Memphis,” I remarked.
+
+“That was his cousin. I knew his whole family history before he
+left. He gave me an aluminium putter that I use today.”
+
+The music had died down as the ceremony began and now a long cheer
+floated in at the window, followed by intermittent cries of
+“Yea—ea—ea!” and finally by a burst of jazz as the dancing began.
+
+“We’re getting old,” said Daisy. “If we were young we’d rise and
+dance.”
+
+“Remember Biloxi,” Jordan warned her. “Where’d you know him, Tom?”
+
+“Biloxi?” He concentrated with an effort. “I didn’t know him. He was a
+friend of Daisy’s.”
+
+“He was not,” she denied. “I’d never seen him before. He came down in
+the private car.”
+
+“Well, he said he knew you. He said he was raised in Louisville. Asa
+Bird brought him around at the last minute and asked if we had room
+for him.”
+
+Jordan smiled.
+
+“He was probably bumming his way home. He told me he was president of
+your class at Yale.”
+
+Tom and I looked at each other blankly.
+
+“Biloxi?”
+
+“First place, we didn’t have any president—”
+
+Gatsby’s foot beat a short, restless tattoo and Tom eyed him suddenly.
+
+“By the way, Mr. Gatsby, I understand you’re an Oxford man.”
+
+“Not exactly.”
+
+“Oh, yes, I understand you went to Oxford.”
+
+“Yes—I went there.”
+
+A pause. Then Tom’s voice, incredulous and insulting:
+
+“You must have gone there about the time Biloxi went to New Haven.”
+
+Another pause. A waiter knocked and came in with crushed mint and ice
+but the silence was unbroken by his “thank you” and the soft closing
+of the door. This tremendous detail was to be cleared up at last.
+
+“I told you I went there,” said Gatsby.
+
+“I heard you, but I’d like to know when.”
+
+“It was in nineteen-nineteen, I only stayed five months. That’s why I
+can’t really call myself an Oxford man.”
+
+Tom glanced around to see if we mirrored his unbelief. But we were all
+looking at Gatsby.
+
+“It was an opportunity they gave to some of the officers after the
+armistice,” he continued. “We could go to any of the universities in
+England or France.”
+
+I wanted to get up and slap him on the back. I had one of those
+renewals of complete faith in him that I’d experienced before.
+
+Daisy rose, smiling faintly, and went to the table.
+
+“Open the whisky, Tom,” she ordered, “and I’ll make you a mint julep.
+Then you won’t seem so stupid to yourself … Look at the mint!”
+
+“Wait a minute,” snapped Tom, “I want to ask Mr. Gatsby one more
+question.”
+
+“Go on,” Gatsby said politely.
+
+“What kind of a row are you trying to cause in my house anyhow?”
+
+They were out in the open at last and Gatsby was content.
+
+“He isn’t causing a row,” Daisy looked desperately from one to the
+other. “You’re causing a row. Please have a little self-control.”
+
+“Self-control!” repeated Tom incredulously. “I suppose the latest
+thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your
+wife. Well, if that’s the idea you can count me out … Nowadays people
+begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next
+they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between
+black and white.”
+
+Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone
+on the last barrier of civilization.
+
+“We’re all white here,” murmured Jordan.
+
+“I know I’m not very popular. I don’t give big parties. I suppose
+you’ve got to make your house into a pigsty in order to have any
+friends—in the modern world.”
+
+Angry as I was, as we all were, I was tempted to laugh whenever he
+opened his mouth. The transition from libertine to prig was so
+complete.
+
+“I’ve got something to tell you, old sport—” began Gatsby. But Daisy
+guessed at his intention.
+
+“Please don’t!” she interrupted helplessly. “Please let’s all go
+home. Why don’t we all go home?”
+
+“That’s a good idea,” I got up. “Come on, Tom. Nobody wants a drink.”
+
+“I want to know what Mr. Gatsby has to tell me.”
+
+“Your wife doesn’t love you,” said Gatsby. “She’s never loved you.
+She loves me.”
+
+“You must be crazy!” exclaimed Tom automatically.
+
+Gatsby sprang to his feet, vivid with excitement.
+
+“She never loved you, do you hear?” he cried. “She only married you
+because I was poor and she was tired of waiting for me. It was a
+terrible mistake, but in her heart she never loved anyone except me!”
+
+At this point Jordan and I tried to go, but Tom and Gatsby insisted
+with competitive firmness that we remain—as though neither of them had
+anything to conceal and it would be a privilege to partake vicariously
+of their emotions.
+
+“Sit down, Daisy,” Tom’s voice groped unsuccessfully for the paternal
+note. “What’s been going on? I want to hear all about it.”
+
+“I told you what’s been going on,” said Gatsby. “Going on for five
+years—and you didn’t know.”
+
+Tom turned to Daisy sharply.
+
+“You’ve been seeing this fellow for five years?”
+
+“Not seeing,” said Gatsby. “No, we couldn’t meet. But both of us loved
+each other all that time, old sport, and you didn’t know. I used to
+laugh sometimes”—but there was no laughter in his eyes—“to think that
+you didn’t know.”
+
+“Oh—that’s all.” Tom tapped his thick fingers together like a
+clergyman and leaned back in his chair.
+
+“You’re crazy!” he exploded. “I can’t speak about what happened five
+years ago, because I didn’t know Daisy then—and I’ll be damned if I
+see how you got within a mile of her unless you brought the groceries
+to the back door. But all the rest of that’s a God damned lie. Daisy
+loved me when she married me and she loves me now.”
+
+“No,” said Gatsby, shaking his head.
+
+“She does, though. The trouble is that sometimes she gets foolish
+ideas in her head and doesn’t know what she’s doing.” He nodded
+sagely. “And what’s more, I love Daisy too. Once in a while I go off
+on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in
+my heart I love her all the time.”
+
+“You’re revolting,” said Daisy. She turned to me, and her voice,
+dropping an octave lower, filled the room with thrilling scorn: “Do
+you know why we left Chicago? I’m surprised that they didn’t treat you
+to the story of that little spree.”
+
+Gatsby walked over and stood beside her.
+
+“Daisy, that’s all over now,” he said earnestly. “It doesn’t matter
+any more. Just tell him the truth—that you never loved him—and it’s
+all wiped out forever.”
+
+She looked at him blindly. “Why—how could I love him—possibly?”
+
+“You never loved him.”
+
+She hesitated. Her eyes fell on Jordan and me with a sort of appeal,
+as though she realized at last what she was doing—and as though she
+had never, all along, intended doing anything at all. But it was done
+now. It was too late.
+
+“I never loved him,” she said, with perceptible reluctance.
+
+“Not at Kapiolani?” demanded Tom suddenly.
+
+“No.”
+
+From the ballroom beneath, muffled and suffocating chords were
+drifting up on hot waves of air.
+
+“Not that day I carried you down from the Punch Bowl to keep your
+shoes dry?” There was a husky tenderness in his tone … “Daisy?”
+
+“Please don’t.” Her voice was cold, but the rancour 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’s 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 tomorrow.”
+
+“You can suit yourself about that, old sport,” said Gatsby steadily.
+
+“I found out what your ‘drugstores’ were.” He turned to us and spoke
+rapidly. “He and this Wolfshiem bought up a lot of side-street
+drugstores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the
+counter. That’s one of his little stunts. I picked him for a
+bootlegger the first time I saw him, and I wasn’t far wrong.”
+
+“What about it?” said Gatsby politely. “I guess your friend Walter
+Chase wasn’t too proud to come in on it.”
+
+“And you left him in the lurch, didn’t you? You let him go to jail for
+a month over in New Jersey. God! You ought to hear Walter on the
+subject of you.”
+
+“He came to us dead broke. He was very glad to pick up some money, old
+sport.”
+
+“Don’t you call me ‘old sport’!” cried Tom. Gatsby said
+nothing. “Walter could have you up on the betting laws too, but
+Wolfshiem scared him into shutting his mouth.”
+
+That unfamiliar yet recognizable look was back again in Gatsby’s face.
+
+“That drugstore 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
+whisky in the towel.
+
+“Want any of this stuff? Jordan? … Nick?”
+
+I didn’t answer.
+
+“Nick?” He asked again.
+
+“What?”
+
+“Want any?”
+
+“No … I just remembered that today’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 coupé with him and started
+for Long Island. Tom talked incessantly, exulting and laughing, but
+his voice was as remote from Jordan and me as the foreign clamour on
+the sidewalk or the tumult of the elevated overhead. Human sympathy
+has its limits, and we were content to let all their tragic arguments
+fade with the city lights behind. Thirty—the promise of a decade of
+loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning
+briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside
+me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten
+dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face
+fell lazily against my coat’s shoulder and the formidable stroke of
+thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.
+
+So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+The young Greek, Michaelis, who ran the coffee joint beside the
+ash-heaps was the principal witness at the inquest. He had slept
+through the heat until after five, when he strolled over to the
+garage, and found George Wilson sick in his office—really sick, pale
+as his own pale hair and shaking all over. Michaelis advised him to go
+to bed, but Wilson refused, saying that he’d miss a lot of business if
+he did. While his neighbour was trying to persuade him a violent
+racket broke out overhead.
+
+“I’ve got my wife locked in up there,” explained Wilson calmly.
+“She’s going to stay there till the day after tomorrow, and then we’re
+going to move away.”
+
+Michaelis was astonished; they had been neighbours for four years, and
+Wilson had never seemed faintly capable of such a statement.
+Generally he was one of these worn-out men: when he wasn’t working, he
+sat on a chair in the doorway and stared at the people and the cars
+that passed along the road. When anyone spoke to him he invariably
+laughed in an agreeable, colourless way. He was his wife’s man and not
+his own.
+
+So naturally Michaelis tried to find out what had happened, but Wilson
+wouldn’t say a word—instead he began to throw curious, suspicious
+glances at his visitor and ask him what he’d been doing at certain
+times on certain days. Just as the latter was getting uneasy, some
+workmen came past the door bound for his restaurant, and Michaelis
+took the opportunity to get away, intending to come back later. But he
+didn’t. He supposed he forgot to, that’s all. When he came outside
+again, a little after seven, he was reminded of the conversation
+because he heard Mrs. Wilson’s voice, loud and scolding, downstairs in
+the garage.
+
+“Beat me!” he heard her cry. “Throw me down and beat me, you dirty
+little coward!”
+
+A moment later she rushed out into the dusk, waving her hands and
+shouting—before he could move from his door the business was over.
+
+The “death car” as the newspapers called it, didn’t stop; it came out
+of the gathering darkness, wavered tragically for a moment, and then
+disappeared around the next bend. Mavro Michaelis wasn’t even sure of
+its colour—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 a little at
+the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the
+tremendous vitality she had stored so long.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+We saw the three or four automobiles and the crowd when we were still
+some distance away.
+
+“Wreck!” said Tom. “That’s good. Wilson’ll have a little business at
+last.”
+
+He slowed down, but still without any intention of stopping, until, as
+we came nearer, the hushed, intent faces of the people at the garage
+door made him automatically put on the brakes.
+
+“We’ll take a look,” he said doubtfully, “just a look.”
+
+I became aware now of a hollow, wailing sound which issued incessantly
+from the garage, a sound which as we got out of the coupé 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 metal
+basket overhead. Then he made a harsh sound in his throat, and with a
+violent thrusting movement of his powerful arms pushed his way
+through.
+
+The circle closed up again with a running murmur of expostulation; it
+was a minute before I could see anything at all. Then new arrivals
+deranged the line, and Jordan and I were pushed suddenly inside.
+
+Myrtle Wilson’s body, wrapped in a blanket, and then in another
+blanket, as though she suffered from a chill in the hot night, lay on
+a worktable by the wall, and Tom, with his back to us, was bending
+over it, motionless. Next to him stood a motorcycle policeman taking
+down names with much sweat and correction in a little book. At first I
+couldn’t find the source of the high, groaning words that echoed
+clamorously through the bare garage—then I saw Wilson standing on the
+raised threshold of his office, swaying back and forth and holding to
+the doorposts with both hands. Some man was talking to him in a low
+voice and attempting, from time to time, to lay a hand on his
+shoulder, but Wilson neither heard nor saw. His eyes would drop slowly
+from the swinging light to the laden table by the wall, and then jerk
+back to the light again, and he gave out incessantly his high,
+horrible call:
+
+“Oh, my Ga-od! Oh, my Ga-od! Oh, Ga-od! Oh, my Ga-od!”
+
+Presently Tom lifted his head with a jerk and, after staring around
+the garage with glazed eyes, addressed a mumbled incoherent remark to
+the policeman.
+
+“M-a-v—” 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 halfway and fell to his side—“she ran out there an’ the one
+comin’ from N’York knock right into her, goin’ thirty or forty miles
+an hour.”
+
+“What’s the name of this place here?” demanded the officer.
+
+“Hasn’t got any name.”
+
+A pale well-dressed negro stepped near.
+
+“It was a yellow car,” he said, “big yellow car. New.”
+
+“See the accident?” asked the policeman.
+
+“No, but the car passed me down the road, going faster’n forty. Going
+fifty, sixty.”
+
+“Come here and let’s have your name. Look out now. I want to get his
+name.”
+
+Some words of this conversation must have reached Wilson, swaying in
+the office door, for suddenly a new theme found voice among his
+grasping cries:
+
+“You don’t have to tell me what kind of car it was! I know what kind
+of car it was!”
+
+Watching Tom, I saw the wad of muscle back of his shoulder tighten
+under his coat. He walked quickly over to Wilson and, standing in
+front of him, seized him firmly by the upper arms.
+
+“You’ve got to pull yourself together,” he said with soothing
+gruffness.
+
+Wilson’s eyes fell upon Tom; he started up on his tiptoes and then
+would have collapsed to his knees had not Tom held him upright.
+
+“Listen,” said Tom, shaking him a little. “I just got here a minute
+ago, from New York. I was bringing you that coupé we’ve been talking
+about. That yellow car I was driving this afternoon wasn’t mine—do you
+hear? I haven’t seen it all afternoon.”
+
+Only the negro and I were near enough to hear what he said, but the
+policeman caught something in the tone and looked over with truculent
+eyes.
+
+“What’s all that?” he demanded.
+
+“I’m a friend of his.” Tom turned his head but kept his hands firm on
+Wilson’s body. “He says he knows the car that did it … It was a yellow
+car.”
+
+Some dim impulse moved the policeman to look suspiciously at Tom.
+
+“And what colour’s your car?”
+
+“It’s a blue car, a coupé.”
+
+“We’ve come straight from New York,” I said.
+
+Someone who had been driving a little behind us confirmed this, and
+the policeman turned away.
+
+“Now, if you’ll let me have that name again correct—”
+
+Picking up Wilson like a doll, Tom carried him into the office, set
+him down in a chair, and came back.
+
+“If somebody’ll come here and sit with him,” he snapped
+authoritatively. He watched while the two men standing closest glanced
+at each other and went unwillingly into the room. Then Tom shut the
+door on them and came down the single step, his eyes avoiding the
+table. As he passed close to me he whispered: “Let’s get out.”
+
+Self-consciously, with his authoritative arms breaking the way, we
+pushed through the still gathering crowd, passing a hurried doctor,
+case in hand, who had been sent for in wild hope half an hour ago.
+
+Tom drove slowly until we were beyond the bend—then his foot came down
+hard, and the coupé 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 tonight.”
+
+A change had come over him, and he spoke gravely, and with decision.
+As we walked across the moonlight gravel to the porch he disposed of
+the situation in a few brisk phrases.
+
+“I’ll telephone for a taxi to take you home, and while you’re waiting
+you and Jordan better go in the kitchen and have them get you some
+supper—if you want any.” He opened the door. “Come in.”
+
+“No, thanks. But I’d be glad if you’d order me the taxi. I’ll wait
+outside.”
+
+Jordan put her hand on my arm.
+
+“Won’t you come in, Nick?”
+
+“No, thanks.”
+
+I was feeling a little sick and I wanted to be alone. But Jordan
+lingered for a moment more.
+
+“It’s only half-past nine,” she said.
+
+I’d be damned if I’d go in; I’d had enough of all of them for one day,
+and suddenly that included Jordan too. She must have seen something of
+this in my expression, for she turned abruptly away and ran up the
+porch steps into the house. I sat down for a few minutes with my head
+in my hands, until I heard the phone taken up inside and the butler’s
+voice calling a taxi. Then I walked slowly down the drive away from
+the house, intending to wait by the gate.
+
+I hadn’t gone twenty yards when I heard my name and Gatsby stepped
+from between two bushes into the path. I must have felt pretty weird
+by that time, because I could think of nothing except the luminosity
+of his pink suit under the moon.
+
+“What are you doing?” I inquired.
+
+“Just standing here, old sport.”
+
+Somehow, that seemed a despicable occupation. For all I knew he was
+going to rob the house in a moment; I wouldn’t have been surprised to
+see sinister faces, the faces of “Wolfshiem’s people,” behind him in
+the dark shrubbery.
+
+“Did you see any trouble on the road?” he asked after a minute.
+
+“Yes.”
+
+He hesitated.
+
+“Was she killed?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“I thought so; I told Daisy I thought so. It’s better that the shock
+should all come at once. She stood it pretty well.”
+
+He spoke as if Daisy’s reaction was the only thing that mattered.
+
+“I got to West Egg by a side road,” he went on, “and left the car in
+my garage. I don’t think anybody saw us, but of course I can’t be
+sure.”
+
+I disliked him so much by this time that I didn’t find it necessary to
+tell him he was wrong.
+
+“Who was the woman?” he inquired.
+
+“Her name was Wilson. Her husband owns the garage. How the devil did
+it happen?”
+
+“Well, I tried to swing the wheel—” He broke off, and suddenly I
+guessed at the truth.
+
+“Was Daisy driving?”
+
+“Yes,” he said after a moment, “but of course I’ll say I was. You see,
+when we left New York she was very nervous and she thought it would
+steady her to drive—and this woman rushed out at us just as we were
+passing a car coming the other way. It all happened in a minute, but
+it seemed to me that she wanted to speak to us, thought we were
+somebody she knew. Well, first Daisy turned away from the woman toward
+the other car, and then she lost her nerve and turned back. The second
+my hand reached the wheel I felt the shock—it must have killed her
+instantly.”
+
+“It ripped her open—”
+
+“Don’t tell me, old sport.” He winced. “Anyhow—Daisy stepped on it. I
+tried to make her stop, but she couldn’t, so I pulled on the emergency
+brake. Then she fell over into my lap and I drove on.
+
+“She’ll be all right tomorrow,” 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 downstairs and the pink glow from Daisy’s room on the ground
+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.
+
+
+                                 VIII
+
+I couldn’t sleep all night; a foghorn was groaning incessantly on the
+Sound, and I tossed half-sick between grotesque reality and savage,
+frightening dreams. Toward dawn I heard a taxi go up Gatsby’s drive,
+and immediately I jumped out of bed and began to dress—I felt that I
+had something to tell him, something to warn him about, and morning
+would be too late.
+
+Crossing his lawn, I saw that his front door was still open and he was
+leaning against a table in the hall, heavy with dejection or sleep.
+
+“Nothing happened,” he said wanly. “I waited, and about four o’clock
+she came to the window and stood there for a minute and then turned
+out the light.”
+
+His house had never seemed so enormous to me as it did that night when
+we hunted through the great rooms for cigarettes. We pushed aside
+curtains that were like pavilions, and felt over innumerable feet of
+dark wall for electric light switches—once I tumbled with a sort of
+splash upon the keys of a ghostly piano. There was an inexplicable
+amount of dust everywhere, and the rooms were musty, as though they
+hadn’t been aired for many days. I found the humidor on an unfamiliar
+table, with two stale, dry cigarettes inside. Throwing open the French
+windows of the drawing-room, we sat smoking out into the darkness.
+
+“You ought to go away,” I said. “It’s pretty certain they’ll trace
+your car.”
+
+“Go away now, old sport?”
+
+“Go to Atlantic City for a week, or up to Montreal.”
+
+He wouldn’t consider it. He couldn’t possibly leave Daisy until he
+knew what she was going to do. He was clutching at some last hope and
+I couldn’t bear to shake him free.
+
+It was this night that he told me the strange story of his youth with
+Dan Cody—told it to me because “Jay Gatsby” had broken up like glass
+against Tom’s hard malice, and the long secret extravaganza was played
+out. I think that he would have acknowledged anything now, without
+reserve, but he wanted to talk about Daisy.
+
+She was the first “nice” girl he had ever known. In various unrevealed
+capacities he had come in contact with such people, but always with
+indiscernible barbed wire between. He found her excitingly
+desirable. He went to her house, at first with other officers from
+Camp Taylor, then alone. It amazed him—he had never been in such a
+beautiful house before. But what gave it an air of breathless
+intensity, was that Daisy lived there—it was as casual a thing to her
+as his tent out at camp was to him. There was a ripe mystery about it,
+a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other
+bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its
+corridors, and of romances that were not musty and laid away already
+in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year’s
+shining motorcars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely
+withered. It excited him, too, that many men had already loved
+Daisy—it increased her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all
+about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still
+vibrant emotions.
+
+But he knew that he was in Daisy’s house by a colossal
+accident. However glorious might be his future as Jay Gatsby, he was
+at present a penniless young man without a past, and at any moment the
+invisible cloak of his uniform might slip from his shoulders. So he
+made the most of his time. He took what he could get, ravenously and
+unscrupulously—eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took
+her because he had no real right to touch her hand.
+
+He might have despised himself, for he had certainly taken her under
+false pretences. 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 strata as
+herself—that he was fully able to take care of her. As a matter of
+fact, he had no such facilities—he had no comfortable family standing
+behind him, and he was liable at the whim of an impersonal government
+to be blown anywhere about the world.
+
+But he didn’t despise himself and it didn’t turn out as he had
+imagined. He had intended, probably, to take what he could and go—but
+now he found that he had committed himself to the following of a
+grail. He knew that Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn’t realize
+just how extraordinary a “nice” girl could be. She vanished into her
+rich house, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby—nothing. He felt
+married to her, that was all.
+
+When they met again, two days later, it was Gatsby who was breathless,
+who was, somehow, betrayed. Her porch was bright with the bought
+luxury of star-shine; the wicker of the settee squeaked fashionably as
+she turned toward him and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth. She
+had caught a cold, and it made her voice huskier and more charming
+than ever, and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and
+mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many
+clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the
+hot struggles of the poor.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+“I can’t describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her,
+old sport. I even hoped for a while that she’d throw me over, but she
+didn’t, because she was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot
+because I knew different things from her … Well, there I was, way off
+my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden
+I didn’t care. What was the use of doing great things if I could have
+a better time telling her what I was going to do?”
+
+On the last afternoon before he went abroad, he sat with Daisy in his
+arms for a long, silent time. It was a cold fall day, with fire in the
+room and her cheeks flushed. Now and then she moved and he changed his
+arm a little, and once he kissed her dark shining hair. The afternoon
+had made them tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deep memory
+for the long parting the next day promised. They had never been closer
+in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with
+another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat’s shoulder
+or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were
+asleep.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+He did extraordinarily well in the war. He was a captain before he
+went to the front, and following the Argonne battles he got his
+majority and the command of the divisional machine-guns. After the
+armistice he tried frantically to get home, but some complication or
+misunderstanding sent him to Oxford instead. He was worried now—there
+was a quality of nervous despair in Daisy’s letters. She didn’t see
+why he couldn’t come. She was feeling the pressure of the world
+outside, and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her
+and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.
+
+For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids
+and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of
+the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new
+tunes. All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the
+“Beale Street Blues” while a hundred pairs of golden and silver
+slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the grey tea hour there were
+always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever,
+while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the
+sad horns around the floor.
+
+Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the
+season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with
+half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and
+chiffon of an evening-dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor
+beside her bed. And all the time something within her was crying for a
+decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately—and the decision
+must be made by some force—of love, of money, of unquestionable
+practicality—that was close at hand.
+
+That force took shape in the middle of spring with the arrival of Tom
+Buchanan. There was a wholesome bulkiness about his person and his
+position, and Daisy was flattered. Doubtless there was a certain
+struggle and a certain relief. The letter reached Gatsby while he was
+still at Oxford.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+It was dawn now on Long Island and we went about opening the rest of
+the windows downstairs, filling the house with grey-turning,
+gold-turning light. The shadow of a tree fell abruptly across the dew
+and ghostly birds began to sing among the blue leaves. There was a
+slow, pleasant movement in the air, scarcely a wind, promising a cool,
+lovely day.
+
+“I don’t think she ever loved him.” Gatsby turned around from a window
+and looked at me challengingly. “You must remember, old sport, she was
+very excited this afternoon. He told her those things in a way that
+frightened her—that made it look as if I was some kind of cheap
+sharper. And the result was she hardly knew what she was saying.”
+
+He sat down gloomily.
+
+“Of course she might have loved him just for a minute, when they were
+first married—and loved me more even then, do you see?”
+
+Suddenly he came out with a curious remark.
+
+“In any case,” he said, “it was just personal.”
+
+What could you make of that, except to suspect some intensity in his
+conception of the affair that couldn’t be measured?
+
+He came back from France when Tom and Daisy were still on their
+wedding trip, and made a miserable but irresistible journey to
+Louisville on the last of his army pay. He stayed there a week,
+walking the streets where their footsteps had clicked together through
+the November night and revisiting the out-of-the-way places to which
+they had driven in her white car. Just as Daisy’s house had always
+seemed to him more mysterious and gay than other houses, so his idea
+of the city itself, even though she was gone from it, was pervaded
+with a melancholy beauty.
+
+He left feeling that if he had searched harder, he might have found
+her—that he was leaving her behind. The day-coach—he was penniless
+now—was hot. He went out to the open vestibule and sat down on a
+folding-chair, and the station slid away and the backs of unfamiliar
+buildings moved by. Then out into the spring fields, where a yellow
+trolley raced them for a minute with people in it who might once have
+seen the pale magic of her face along the casual street.
+
+The track curved and now it was going away from the sun, which, as it
+sank lower, seemed to spread itself in benediction over the vanishing
+city where she had drawn her breath. He stretched out his hand
+desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of
+the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too
+fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part
+of it, the freshest and the best, forever.
+
+It was nine o’clock when we finished breakfast and went out on the
+porch. The night had made a sharp difference in the weather and there
+was an autumn flavour 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 today, Mr. Gatsby. Leaves’ll start
+falling pretty soon, and then there’s always trouble with the pipes.”
+
+“Don’t do it today,” 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, goodbye.”
+
+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
+colour 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 goodbye.
+
+I thanked him for his hospitality. We were always thanking him for
+that—I and the others.
+
+“Goodbye,” I called. “I enjoyed breakfast, Gatsby.”
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Up in the city, I tried for a while to list the quotations on an
+interminable amount of stock, then I fell asleep in my swivel-chair.
+Just before noon the phone woke me, and I started up with sweat
+breaking out on my forehead. It was Jordan Baker; she often called me
+up at this hour because the uncertainty of her own movements between
+hotels and clubs and private houses made her hard to find in any other
+way. Usually her voice came over the wire as something fresh and cool,
+as if a divot from a green golf-links had come sailing in at the
+office window, but this morning it seemed harsh and dry.
+
+“I’ve left Daisy’s house,” she said. “I’m at Hempstead, and I’m going
+down to Southampton this afternoon.”
+
+Probably it had been tactful to leave Daisy’s house, but the act
+annoyed me, and her next remark made me rigid.
+
+“You weren’t so nice to me last night.”
+
+“How could it have mattered then?”
+
+Silence for a moment. Then:
+
+“However—I want to see you.”
+
+“I want to see you, too.”
+
+“Suppose I don’t go to Southampton, and come into town this
+afternoon?”
+
+“No—I don’t think this afternoon.”
+
+“Very well.”
+
+“It’s impossible this afternoon. Various—”
+
+We talked like that for a while, and then abruptly we weren’t talking
+any longer. I don’t know which of us hung up with a sharp click, but I
+know I didn’t care. I couldn’t have talked to her across a tea-table
+that day if I never talked to her again in this world.
+
+I called Gatsby’s house a few minutes later, but the line was busy. I
+tried four times; finally an exasperated central told me the wire was
+being kept open for long distance from Detroit. Taking out my
+timetable, I drew a small circle around the three-fifty train. Then I
+leaned back in my chair and tried to think. It was just noon.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+When I passed the ash-heaps on the train that morning I had crossed
+deliberately to the other side of the car. I supposed there’d be a
+curious crowd around there all day with little boys searching for dark
+spots in the dust, and some garrulous man telling over and over what
+had happened, until it became less and less real even to him and he
+could tell it no longer, and Myrtle Wilson’s tragic achievement was
+forgotten. Now I want to go back a little and tell what happened at
+the garage after we left there the night before.
+
+They had difficulty in locating the sister, Catherine. She must have
+broken her rule against drinking that night, for when she arrived she
+was stupid with liquor and unable to understand that the ambulance had
+already gone to Flushing. When they convinced her of this, she
+immediately fainted, as if that was the intolerable part of the
+affair. Someone, kind or curious, took her in his car and drove her in
+the wake of her sister’s body.
+
+Until long after midnight a changing crowd lapped up against the front
+of the garage, while George Wilson rocked himself back and forth on
+the couch inside. For a while the door of the office was open, and
+everyone who came into the garage glanced irresistibly through it.
+Finally someone said it was a shame, and closed the door. Michaelis
+and several other men were with him; first, four or five men, later
+two or three men. Still later Michaelis had to ask the last stranger
+to wait there fifteen minutes longer, while he went back to his own
+place and made a pot of coffee. After that, he stayed there alone with
+Wilson until dawn.
+
+About three o’clock the quality of Wilson’s incoherent muttering
+changed—he grew quieter and began to talk about the yellow car. He
+announced that he had a way of finding out whom the yellow car
+belonged to, and then he blurted out that a couple of months ago his
+wife had come from the city with her face bruised and her nose
+swollen.
+
+But when he heard himself say this, he flinched and began to cry “Oh,
+my God!” again in his groaning voice. Michaelis made a clumsy attempt
+to distract him.
+
+“How long have you been married, George? Come on there, try and sit
+still a minute, and answer my question. How long have you been
+married?”
+
+“Twelve years.”
+
+“Ever had any children? Come on, George, sit still—I asked you a
+question. Did you ever have any children?”
+
+The hard brown beetles kept thudding against the dull light, and
+whenever Michaelis heard a car go tearing along the road outside it
+sounded to him like the car that hadn’t stopped a few hours before.
+He didn’t like to go into the garage, because the work bench was
+stained where the body had been lying, so he moved uncomfortably
+around the office—he knew every object in it before morning—and from
+time to time sat down beside Wilson trying to keep him more quiet.
+
+“Have you got a church you go to sometimes, George? Maybe even if you
+haven’t been there for a long time? Maybe I could call up the church
+and get a priest to come over and he could talk to you, see?”
+
+“Don’t belong to any.”
+
+“You ought to have a church, George, for times like this. You must
+have gone to church once. Didn’t you get married in a church? Listen,
+George, listen to me. Didn’t you get married in a church?”
+
+“That was a long time ago.”
+
+The effort of answering broke the rhythm of his rocking—for a moment
+he was silent. Then the same half-knowing, half-bewildered look came
+back into his faded eyes.
+
+“Look in the drawer there,” he said, pointing at the desk.
+
+“Which drawer?”
+
+“That drawer—that one.”
+
+Michaelis opened the drawer nearest his hand. There was nothing in it
+but a small, expensive dog-leash, made of leather and braided
+silver. It was apparently new.
+
+“This?” he inquired, holding it up.
+
+Wilson stared and nodded.
+
+“I found it yesterday afternoon. She tried to tell me about it, but I
+knew it was something funny.”
+
+“You mean your wife bought it?”
+
+“She had it wrapped in tissue paper on her bureau.”
+
+Michaelis didn’t see anything odd in that, and he gave Wilson a dozen
+reasons why his wife might have bought the dog-leash. But conceivably
+Wilson had heard some of these same explanations before, from Myrtle,
+because he began saying “Oh, my God!” again in a whisper—his comforter
+left several explanations in the air.
+
+“Then he killed her,” said Wilson. His mouth dropped open suddenly.
+
+“Who did?”
+
+“I have a way of finding out.”
+
+“You’re morbid, George,” said his friend. “This has been a strain to
+you and you don’t know what you’re saying. You’d better try and sit
+quiet till morning.”
+
+“He murdered her.”
+
+“It was an accident, George.”
+
+Wilson shook his head. His eyes narrowed and his mouth widened
+slightly with the ghost of a superior “Hm!”
+
+“I know,” he said definitely. “I’m one of these trusting fellas and I
+don’t think any harm to nobody, but when I get to know a thing I know
+it. It was the man in that car. She ran out to speak to him and he
+wouldn’t stop.”
+
+Michaelis had seen this too, but it hadn’t occurred to him that there
+was any special significance in it. He believed that Mrs. Wilson had
+been running away from her husband, rather than trying to stop any
+particular car.
+
+“How could she of been like that?”
+
+“She’s a deep one,” said Wilson, as if that answered the question.
+“Ah-h-h—”
+
+He began to rock again, and Michaelis stood twisting the leash in his
+hand.
+
+“Maybe you got some friend that I could telephone for, George?”
+
+This was a forlorn hope—he was almost sure that Wilson had no friend:
+there was not enough of him for his wife. He was glad a little later
+when he noticed a change in the room, a blue quickening by the window,
+and realized that dawn wasn’t far off. About five o’clock it was blue
+enough outside to snap off the light.
+
+Wilson’s glazed eyes turned out to the ash-heaps, where small grey
+clouds took on fantastic shapes and scurried here and there in the
+faint dawn wind.
+
+“I spoke to her,” he muttered, after a long silence. “I told her she
+might fool me but she couldn’t fool God. I took her to the
+window”—with an effort he got up and walked to the rear window and
+leaned with his face pressed against it—“and I said ‘God knows what
+you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but
+you can’t fool God!’ ”
+
+Standing behind him, Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at
+the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, which had just emerged, pale and
+enormous, from the dissolving night.
+
+“God sees everything,” repeated Wilson.
+
+“That’s an advertisement,” Michaelis assured him. Something made him
+turn away from the window and look back into the room. But Wilson
+stood there a long time, his face close to the window pane, nodding
+into the twilight.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+By six o’clock Michaelis was worn out, and grateful for the sound of a
+car stopping outside. It was one of the watchers of the night before
+who had promised to come back, so he cooked breakfast for three, which
+he and the other man ate together. Wilson was quieter now, and
+Michaelis went home to sleep; when he awoke four hours later and
+hurried back to the garage, Wilson was gone.
+
+His movements—he was on foot all the time—were afterward traced to
+Port Roosevelt and then to Gad’s Hill, where he bought a sandwich that
+he didn’t eat, and a cup of coffee. He must have been tired and
+walking slowly, for he didn’t reach Gad’s Hill until noon. Thus far
+there was no difficulty in accounting for his time—there were boys who
+had seen a man “acting sort of crazy,” and motorists at whom he stared
+oddly from the side of the road. Then for three hours he disappeared
+from view. The police, on the strength of what he said to Michaelis,
+that he “had a way of finding out,” supposed that he spent that time
+going from garage to garage thereabout, inquiring for a yellow car. On
+the other hand, no garage man who had seen him ever came forward, and
+perhaps he had an easier, surer way of finding out what he wanted to
+know. By half-past two he was in West Egg, where he asked someone the
+way to Gatsby’s house. So by that time he knew Gatsby’s name.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+At two o’clock Gatsby put on his bathing-suit and left word with the
+butler that if anyone 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 to
+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 anyone
+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 protégés—heard the
+shots—afterwards 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 anyone. 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 transit, a thin red
+circle in the water.
+
+It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener
+saw Wilson’s body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was
+complete.
+
+
+                                  IX
+
+After two years I remember the rest of that day, and that night and
+the next day, only as an endless drill of police and photographers and
+newspaper men in and out of Gatsby’s front door. A rope stretched
+across the main gate and a policeman by it kept out the curious, but
+little boys soon discovered that they could enter through my yard, and
+there were always a few of them clustered open-mouthed about the
+pool. Someone with a positive manner, perhaps a detective, used the
+expression “madman” as he bent over Wilson’s body that afternoon, and
+the adventitious authority of his voice set the key for the newspaper
+reports next morning.
+
+Most of those reports were a nightmare—grotesque, circumstantial,
+eager, and untrue. When Michaelis’s testimony at the inquest brought
+to light Wilson’s suspicions of his wife I thought the whole tale
+would shortly be served up in racy pasquinade—but Catherine, who might
+have said anything, didn’t say a word. She showed a surprising amount
+of character about it too—looked at the coroner with determined eyes
+under that corrected brow of hers, and swore that her sister had never
+seen Gatsby, that her sister was completely happy with her husband,
+that her sister had been into no mischief whatever. She convinced
+herself of it, and cried into her handkerchief, as if the very
+suggestion was more than she could endure. So Wilson was reduced to a
+man “deranged by grief” in order that the case might remain in its
+simplest form. And it rested there.
+
+But all this part of it seemed remote and unessential. I found myself
+on Gatsby’s side, and alone. From the moment I telephoned news of the
+catastrophe to West Egg village, every surmise about him, and every
+practical question, was referred to me. At first I was surprised and
+confused; then, as he lay in his house and didn’t move or breathe or
+speak, hour upon hour, it grew upon me that I was responsible, because
+no one else was interested—interested, I mean, with that intense
+personal interest to which everyone 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 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, though they drew back the sheet and looked at Gatsby with
+shocked 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.”
+
+Someone started to ask me questions, but I broke away and going
+upstairs looked hastily through the unlocked parts of his desk—he’d
+never told me definitely that his parents were dead. But there was
+nothing—only the picture of Dan Cody, a token of forgotten violence,
+staring down from the wall.
+
+Next morning I sent the butler to New York with a letter to Wolfshiem,
+which asked for information and urged him to come out on the next
+train. That request seemed superfluous when I wrote it. I was sure
+he’d start when he saw the newspapers, just as I was sure there’d be a
+wire from Daisy before noon—but neither a wire nor Mr. Wolfshiem
+arrived; no one arrived except more police and photographers and
+newspaper men. When the butler brought back Wolfshiem’s answer I began
+to have a feeling of defiance, of scornful solidarity between Gatsby
+and me against them all.
+
+ Dear Mr. Carraway. This has been one of the most terrible shocks of
+ my life to me I hardly can believe it that it is true at all. Such a
+ mad act as that man did should make us all think. I cannot come down
+ now as I am tied up in some very important business and cannot get
+ mixed up in this thing now. If there is anything I can do a little
+ later let me know in a letter by Edgar. I hardly know where I am when
+ I hear about a thing like this and am completely knocked down and
+ out.
+
+                               Yours truly
+
+                             Meyer Wolfshiem
+
+and then hasty addenda beneath:
+
+ Let me know about the funeral etc do not know his family at all.
+
+When the phone rang that afternoon and Long Distance said Chicago was
+calling I thought this would be Daisy at last. But the connection came
+through as a man’s voice, very thin and far away.
+
+“This is Slagle speaking …”
+
+“Yes?” The name was unfamiliar.
+
+“Hell of a note, isn’t it? Get my wire?”
+
+“There haven’t been any wires.”
+
+“Young Parke’s in trouble,” he said rapidly. “They picked him up when
+he handed the bonds over the counter. They got a circular from New
+York giving ’em the numbers just five minutes before. What d’you know
+about that, hey? You never can tell in these hick towns—”
+
+“Hello!” I interrupted breathlessly. “Look here—this isn’t Mr.
+Gatsby. Mr. Gatsby’s dead.”
+
+There was a long silence on the other end of the wire, followed by an
+exclamation … then a quick squawk as the connection was broken.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+I think it was on the third day that a telegram signed Henry C. Gatz
+arrived from a town in Minnesota. It said only that the sender was
+leaving immediately and to postpone the funeral until he came.
+
+It was Gatsby’s father, a solemn old man, very helpless and dismayed,
+bundled up in a long cheap ulster against the warm September day. His
+eyes leaked continuously with excitement, and when I took the bag and
+umbrella from his hands he began to pull so incessantly at his sparse
+grey beard that I had difficulty in getting off his coat. He was on
+the point of collapse, so I took him into the music-room and made him
+sit down while I sent for something to eat. But he wouldn’t eat, and
+the glass of milk spilled from his trembling hand.
+
+“I saw it in the Chicago newspaper,” he said. “It was all in the
+Chicago newspaper. I started right away.”
+
+“I didn’t know how to reach you.”
+
+His eyes, seeing nothing, moved ceaselessly about the room.
+
+“It was a madman,” he said. “He must have been mad.”
+
+“Wouldn’t you like some coffee?” I urged him.
+
+“I don’t want anything. I’m all right now, Mr.—”
+
+“Carraway.”
+
+“Well, I’m all right now. Where have they got Jimmy?”
+
+I took him into the drawing-room, where his son lay, and left him
+there. Some little boys had come up on the steps and were looking into
+the hall; when I told them who had arrived, they went reluctantly
+away.
+
+After a little while Mr. Gatz opened the door and came out, his mouth
+ajar, his face flushed slightly, his eyes leaking isolated and
+unpunctual tears. He had reached an age where death no longer has the
+quality of ghastly surprise, and when he looked around him now for the
+first time and saw the height and splendour 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 upstairs; 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 tomorrow,” I said. “Three o’clock, here at the house.
+I wish you’d tell anybody who’d be interested.”
+
+“Oh, I will,” he broke out hastily. “Of course I’m not likely to see
+anybody, but if I do.”
+
+His tone made me suspicious.
+
+“Of course you’ll be there yourself.”
+
+“Well, I’ll certainly try. What I called up about is—”
+
+“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “How about saying you’ll come?”
+
+“Well, the fact is—the truth of the matter is that I’m staying with
+some people up here in Greenwich, and they rather expect me to be with
+them tomorrow. In fact, there’s a sort of picnic or something. Of
+course I’ll do my best to get away.”
+
+I ejaculated an unrestrained “Huh!” and he must have heard me, for he
+went on nervously:
+
+“What I called up about was a pair of shoes I left there. I wonder if
+it’d be too much trouble to have the butler send them on. You see,
+they’re tennis shoes, and I’m sort of helpless without them. My
+address is care of B. F.—”
+
+I didn’t hear the rest of the name, because I hung up the receiver.
+
+After that I felt a certain shame for Gatsby—one gentleman to whom I
+telephoned implied that he had got what he deserved. However, that was
+my fault, for he was one of those who used to sneer most bitterly at
+Gatsby on the courage of Gatsby’s liquor, and I should have known
+better than to call him.
+
+The morning of the funeral I went up to New York to see Meyer
+Wolfshiem; I couldn’t seem to reach him any other way. The door that I
+pushed open, on the advice of an elevator boy, was marked “The
+Swastika Holding Company,” and at first there didn’t seem to be anyone
+inside. But when I’d shouted “hello” several times in vain, an
+argument broke out behind a partition, and presently a lovely Jewess
+appeared at an interior door and scrutinized me with black hostile
+eyes.
+
+“Nobody’s in,” she said. “Mr. Wolfshiem’s gone to Chicago.”
+
+The first part of this was obviously untrue, for someone had begun to
+whistle “The Rosary,” tunelessly, inside.
+
+“Please say that Mr. Carraway wants to see him.”
+
+“I can’t get him back from Chicago, can I?”
+
+At this moment a voice, unmistakably Wolfshiem’s, called “Stella!”
+from the other side of the door.
+
+“Leave your name on the desk,” she said quickly. “I’ll give it to him
+when he gets back.”
+
+“But I know he’s there.”
+
+She took a step toward me and began to slide her hands indignantly up
+and down her hips.
+
+“You young men think you can force your way in here any time,” she
+scolded. “We’re getting sickantired of it. When I say he’s in Chicago,
+he’s in Chicago.”
+
+I mentioned Gatsby.
+
+“Oh-h!” She looked at me over again. “Will you just—What was your
+name?”
+
+She vanished. In a moment Meyer Wolfshiem stood solemnly in the
+doorway, holding out both hands. He drew me into his office, remarking
+in a reverent voice that it was a sad time for all of us, and offered
+me a cigar.
+
+“My memory goes back to when first I 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
+came into Winebrenner’s poolroom at Forty-third Street and asked for a
+job. He hadn’t eat anything for a couple of days. ‘Come on have some
+lunch with me,’ I said. He ate more than four dollars’ worth of food
+in half an hour.”
+
+“Did you start him in business?” I inquired.
+
+“Start him! I made him.”
+
+“Oh.”
+
+“I raised him up out of nothing, right out of the gutter. I saw right
+away he was a fine-appearing, gentlemanly young man, and when he told
+me he was at Oggsford I knew I could use him good. I got him to join
+the American Legion and he used to stand high there. Right off he did
+some work for a client of mine up to Albany. We were so thick like
+that in everything”—he held up two bulbous fingers—“always together.”
+
+I wondered if this partnership had included the World’s Series
+transaction in 1919.
+
+“Now he’s dead,” I said after a moment. “You were his closest friend,
+so I know you’ll want to come to his funeral this afternoon.”
+
+“I’d like to come.”
+
+“Well, come then.”
+
+The hair in his nostrils quivered slightly, and as he shook his head
+his eyes filled with tears.
+
+“I can’t do it—I can’t get mixed up in it,” he said.
+
+“There’s nothing to get mixed up in. It’s all over now.”
+
+“When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it in any
+way. I keep out. When I was a young man it was different—if a friend
+of mine died, no matter how, I stuck with them to the end. You may
+think that’s sentimental, but I mean it—to the bitter end.”
+
+I saw that for some reason of his own he was determined not to come,
+so I stood up.
+
+“Are you a college man?” he inquired suddenly.
+
+For a moment I thought he was going to suggest a “gonnegtion,” but he
+only nodded and shook my hand.
+
+“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and
+not after he is dead,” he suggested. “After that my own rule is to let
+everything alone.”
+
+When I left his office the sky had turned dark and I got back to West
+Egg in a drizzle. After changing my clothes I went next door and found
+Mr. Gatz walking up and down excitedly in the hall. His pride in his
+son and in his son’s possessions was continually increasing and now he
+had something to show me.
+
+“Jimmy sent me this picture.” He took out his wallet with trembling
+fingers. “Look there.”
+
+It was a photograph of the house, cracked in the corners and dirty
+with many hands. He pointed out every detail to me eagerly. “Look
+there!” and then sought admiration from my eyes. He had shown it so
+often that I think it was more real to him now than the house itself.
+
+“Jimmy sent it to me. I think it’s a very pretty picture. It shows up
+well.”
+
+“Very well. Had you seen him lately?”
+
+“He come out to see me two years ago and bought me the house I live in
+now. Of course we was broke up when he run off from home, but I see
+now there was a reason for it. He knew he had a big future in front of
+him. And ever since he made a success he was very generous with me.”
+
+He seemed reluctant to put away the picture, held it for another
+minute, lingeringly, before my eyes. Then he returned the wallet and
+pulled from his pocket a ragged old copy of a book called Hopalong
+Cassidy.
+
+“Look here, this is a book he had when he was a boy. It just shows
+you.”
+
+He opened it at the back cover and turned it around for me to see. On
+the last flyleaf was printed the word schedule, and the date September
+12, 1906. And underneath:
+
+    Rise from bed                                  6:00      a.m.
+    Dumbell 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 ”
+    Practise 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 came across this book by accident,” said the old man. “It just
+shows you, don’t it?”
+
+“It just shows you.”
+
+“Jimmy was bound to get ahead. He always had some resolves like this
+or something. Do you notice what he’s got about improving his mind? He
+was always great for that. He told me I et like a hog once, and I beat
+him for it.”
+
+He was reluctant to close the book, reading each item aloud and then
+looking eagerly at me. I think he rather expected me to copy down the
+list for my own use.
+
+A little before three the Lutheran minister arrived from Flushing, and
+I began to look involuntarily out the windows for other cars. So did
+Gatsby’s father. And as the time passed and the servants came in and
+stood waiting in the hall, his eyes began to blink anxiously, and he
+spoke of the rain in a worried, uncertain way. The minister glanced
+several times at his watch, so I took him aside and asked him to wait
+for half an hour. But it wasn’t any use. Nobody came.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+About five o’clock our procession of three cars reached the cemetery
+and stopped in a thick drizzle beside the gate—first a motor hearse,
+horribly black and wet, then Mr. Gatz and the minister and me in the
+limousine, and a little later four or five servants and the postman
+from West Egg, in Gatsby’s station wagon, all wet to the skin. As we
+started through the gate into the cemetery I heard a car stop and then
+the sound of someone splashing after us over the soggy ground. I
+looked around. It was the man with owl-eyed glasses whom I had found
+marvelling over Gatsby’s books in the library one night three months
+before.
+
+I’d never seen him since then. I don’t know how he knew about the
+funeral, or even his name. The rain poured down his thick glasses, and
+he took them off and wiped them to see the protecting canvas unrolled
+from Gatsby’s grave.
+
+I tried to think about Gatsby then for a moment, but he was already
+too far away, and I could only remember, without resentment, that
+Daisy hadn’t sent a message or a flower. Dimly I heard someone murmur
+“Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on,” and then the owl-eyed
+man said “Amen to that,” in a brave voice.
+
+We straggled down quickly through the rain to the cars. Owl-eyes spoke
+to me by the gate.
+
+“I couldn’t get to the house,” he remarked.
+
+“Neither could anybody else.”
+
+“Go on!” He started. “Why, my God! they used to go there by the
+hundreds.”
+
+He took off his glasses and wiped them again, outside and in.
+
+“The poor son-of-a-bitch,” he said.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school
+and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than
+Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o’clock of a
+December evening, with a few Chicago friends, already caught up into
+their own holiday gaieties, to bid them a hasty goodbye. I remember
+the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-That’s and the
+chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught
+sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: “Are you
+going to the Ordways’? the Herseys’? the Schultzes’?” and the long
+green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky
+yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad looking
+cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.
+
+When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow,
+began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and
+the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild
+brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we
+walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware
+of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we
+melted indistinguishably into it again.
+
+That’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede
+towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street
+lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly
+wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a
+little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent
+from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are
+still called through decades by a family’s name. I see now that this
+has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and
+Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some
+deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.
+
+Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware
+of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the
+Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the
+children and the very old—even then it had always for me a quality of
+distortion. West Egg, especially, still figures in my more fantastic
+dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at
+once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging
+sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress
+suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a
+drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over
+the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a
+house—the wrong house. But no one knows the woman’s name, and no one
+cares.
+
+After Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted
+beyond my eyes’ power of correction. So when the blue smoke of brittle
+leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the
+line I decided to come back home.
+
+There was one thing to be done before I left, an awkward, unpleasant
+thing that perhaps had better have been let alone. But I wanted to
+leave things in order and not just trust that obliging and indifferent
+sea to sweep my refuse away. I saw Jordan Baker and talked over and
+around what had happened to us together, and what had happened
+afterward to me, and she lay perfectly still, listening, in a big
+chair.
+
+She was dressed to play golf, and I remember thinking she looked like
+a good illustration, her chin raised a little jauntily, her hair the
+colour 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 goodbye.
+
+“Nevertheless you did throw me over,” said Jordan suddenly. “You threw
+me over on the telephone. I don’t give a damn about you now, but it
+was a new experience for me, and I felt a little dizzy for a while.”
+
+We shook hands.
+
+“Oh, and do you remember”—she added—“a conversation we had once about
+driving a car?”
+
+“Why—not exactly.”
+
+“You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver?
+Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me
+to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest,
+straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.”
+
+“I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and
+call it honour.”
+
+She didn’t answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously
+sorry, I turned away.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+One afternoon late in October I saw Tom Buchanan. He was walking ahead
+of me along Fifth Avenue in his alert, aggressive way, his hands out a
+little from his body as if to fight off interference, his head moving
+sharply here and there, adapting itself to his restless eyes. Just as
+I slowed up to avoid overtaking him he stopped and began frowning into
+the windows of a jewellery store. Suddenly he saw me and walked back,
+holding out his hand.
+
+“What’s the matter, Nick? Do you object to shaking hands with me?”
+
+“Yes. You know what I think of you.”
+
+“You’re crazy, Nick,” he said quickly. “Crazy as hell. I don’t know
+what’s the matter with you.”
+
+“Tom,” I inquired, “what did you say to Wilson that afternoon?”
+
+He stared at me without a word, and I knew I had guessed right about
+those missing hours. I started to turn away, but he took a step after
+me and grabbed my arm.
+
+“I told him the truth,” he said. “He came to the door while we were
+getting ready to leave, and when I sent down word that we weren’t in
+he tried to force his way upstairs. 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 jewellery
+store to buy a pearl necklace—or perhaps only a pair of cuff
+buttons—rid of my provincial squeamishness forever.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Gatsby’s house was still empty when I left—the grass on his lawn had
+grown as long as mine. One of the taxi drivers in the village never
+took a fare past the entrance gate without stopping for a minute and
+pointing inside; perhaps it was he who drove Daisy and Gatsby over to
+East Egg the night of the accident, and perhaps he had made a story
+about it all his own. I didn’t want to hear it and I avoided him when
+I got off the train.
+
+I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming,
+dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still
+hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant, from his garden,
+and the cars going up and down his drive. One night I did hear a
+material car there, and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I
+didn’t investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away
+at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over.
+
+On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer,
+I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once
+more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a
+piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it,
+drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the
+beach and sprawled out on the sand.
+
+Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any
+lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the
+Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to
+melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that
+flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new
+world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s
+house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all
+human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his
+breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic
+contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the
+last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for
+wonder.
+
+And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of
+Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of
+Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream
+must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He
+did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that
+vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic
+rolled on under the night.
+
+Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by
+year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no
+matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further … And
+one fine morning—
+
+So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into
+the past.
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