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.