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- Title: The Great Gatsby
- Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Release date: January 17, 2021 [eBook #64317]
- Most recently updated: January 26, 2025
- Language: English
- Credits: Produced by Alex Cabal for the Standard Ebooks project, based on a transcription produced for Project Gutenberg Australia.
- *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREAT GATSBY ***
- The Great Gatsby
- by
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Table of Contents
- I
- II
- III
- IV
- V
- VI
- VII
- VIII
- IX
- Once again
- to
- Zelda
- Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
- If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
- Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
- I must have you!”
- Thomas Parke d’Invilliers
- I
- In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice
- that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
- “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just
- remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages
- that you’ve had.”
- He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative
- in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more
- than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgements, a
- habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me
- the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to
- detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal
- person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of
- being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild,
- unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have
- feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by
- some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on
- the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least
- the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and
- marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgements is a matter of
- infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I
- forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly
- repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out
- unequally at birth.
- And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission
- that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the
- wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded
- on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted
- the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I
- wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the
- human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was
- exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I
- have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of
- successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some
- heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related
- to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten
- thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that
- flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the
- “creative temperament”—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a
- romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and
- which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out
- all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust
- floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my
- interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
- My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle
- Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a
- clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of
- Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s
- brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil
- War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father
- carries on today.
- I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him—with
- special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in
- father’s office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of
- a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that
- delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the
- counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being
- the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the
- ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn the bond
- business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it
- could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it
- over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said,
- “Why—ye-es,” with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance
- me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I
- thought, in the spring of twenty-two.
- The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm
- season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly
- trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a
- house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He
- found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a
- month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and
- I went out to the country alone. I had a dog—at least I had him for a
- few days until he ran away—and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who
- made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to
- herself over the electric stove.
- It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more
- recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.
- “How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly.
- I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide,
- a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the
- freedom of the neighbourhood.
- And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the
- trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar
- conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
- There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to
- be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen
- volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they
- stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint,
- promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and
- Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other
- books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a
- series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News—and now
- I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become
- again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.”
- This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at
- from a single window, after all.
- It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of
- the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender
- riotous island which extends itself due east of New York—and where
- there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of
- land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in
- contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most
- domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great
- wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals—like the
- egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact
- end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual
- wonder to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more
- interesting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular
- except shape and size.
- I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though
- this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little
- sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the
- egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge
- places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on
- my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual
- imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one
- side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble
- swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was
- Gatsby’s mansion. Or, rather, as I didn’t know Mr. Gatsby, it was a
- mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an
- eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I
- had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbour’s lawn, and
- the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a
- month.
- Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg
- glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins
- on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom
- Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I’d known Tom
- in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in
- Chicago.
- Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of
- the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a
- national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute
- limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of
- anticlimax. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his
- freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago
- and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for
- instance, he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake
- Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was
- wealthy enough to do that.
- Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France for
- no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully
- wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a
- permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe
- it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift
- on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of
- some irrecoverable football game.
- And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East
- Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house
- was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white
- Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at
- the beach and ran towards the front door for a quarter of a mile,
- jumping over sundials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when
- it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though
- from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French
- windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm
- windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with
- his legs apart on the front porch.
- He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy
- straw-haired man of thirty, with a rather hard mouth and a
- supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established
- dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning
- aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding
- clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill
- those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could
- see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his
- thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.
- His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of
- fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in
- it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who
- had hated his guts.
- “Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final,” he seemed to
- say, “just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.” We
- were in the same senior society, and while we were never intimate I
- always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like
- him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.
- We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.
- “I’ve got a nice place here,” he said, his eyes flashing about
- restlessly.
- Turning me around by one arm, he moved a broad flat hand along the
- front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half
- acre of deep, pungent roses, and a snub-nosed motorboat that bumped
- the tide offshore.
- “It belonged to Demaine, the oil man.” He turned me around again,
- politely and abruptly. “We’ll go inside.”
- We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-coloured space,
- fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The
- windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside
- that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through
- the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale
- flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the
- ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow
- on it as wind does on the sea.
- The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous
- couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an
- anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were
- rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a
- short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments
- listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a
- picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the
- rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the
- curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the
- floor.
- The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full
- length at her end of the divan, completely motionless, and with her
- chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which
- was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes
- she gave no hint of it—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring
- an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.
- The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she leaned slightly
- forward with a conscientious expression—then she laughed, an absurd,
- charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the
- room.
- “I’m p-paralysed with happiness.”
- She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my
- hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was
- no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she
- had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was
- Baker. (I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people
- lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less
- charming.)
- At any rate, Miss Baker’s lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost
- imperceptibly, and then quickly tipped her head back again—the object
- she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her
- something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips.
- Almost any exhibition of complete self-sufficiency draws a stunned
- tribute from me.
- I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low,
- thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and
- down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be
- played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it,
- bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement
- in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget:
- a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had
- done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay,
- exciting things hovering in the next hour.
- I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way East,
- and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.
- “Do they miss me?” she cried ecstatically.
- “The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel
- painted black as a mourning wreath, and there’s a persistent wail all
- night along the north shore.”
- “How gorgeous! Let’s go back, Tom. Tomorrow!” Then she added
- irrelevantly: “You ought to see the baby.”
- “I’d like to.”
- “She’s asleep. She’s three years old. Haven’t you ever seen her?”
- “Never.”
- “Well, you ought to see her. She’s—”
- Tom Buchanan, who had been hovering restlessly about the room, stopped
- and rested his hand on my shoulder.
- “What you doing, Nick?”
- “I’m a bond man.”
- “Who with?”
- I told him.
- “Never heard of them,” he remarked decisively.
- This annoyed me.
- “You will,” I answered shortly. “You will if you stay in the East.”
- “Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry,” he said, glancing at
- Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something
- more. “I’d be a God damned fool to live anywhere else.”
- At this point Miss Baker said: “Absolutely!” with such suddenness that
- I started—it was the first word she had uttered since I came into the
- room. Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned
- and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.
- “I’m stiff,” she complained, “I’ve been lying on that sofa for as long
- as I can remember.”
- “Don’t look at me,” Daisy retorted, “I’ve been trying to get you to
- New York all afternoon.”
- “No, thanks,” said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the
- pantry. “I’m absolutely in training.”
- Her host looked at her incredulously.
- “You are!” He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom
- of a glass. “How you ever get anything done is beyond me.”
- I looked at Miss Baker, wondering what it was she “got done.” I
- enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with
- an erect carriage, which she accentuated by throwing her body backward
- at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked
- back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming,
- discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a
- picture of her, somewhere before.
- “You live in West Egg,” she remarked contemptuously. “I know somebody
- there.”
- “I don’t know a single—”
- “You must know Gatsby.”
- “Gatsby?” demanded Daisy. “What Gatsby?”
- Before I could reply that he was my neighbour dinner was announced;
- wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine, Tom Buchanan compelled
- me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.
- Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips, the two
- young women preceded us out on to a rosy-coloured porch, open toward
- the sunset, where four candles flickered on the table in the
- diminished wind.
- “Why candles?” objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her
- fingers. “In two weeks it’ll be the longest day in the year.” She
- looked at us all radiantly. “Do you always watch for the longest day
- of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in
- the year and then miss it.”
- “We ought to plan something,” yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the
- table as if she were getting into bed.
- “All right,” said Daisy. “What’ll we plan?” She turned to me
- helplessly: “What do people plan?”
- Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her
- little finger.
- “Look!” she complained; “I hurt it.”
- We all looked—the knuckle was black and blue.
- “You did it, Tom,” she said accusingly. “I know you didn’t mean to,
- but you did do it. That’s what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a
- great, big, hulking physical specimen of a—”
- “I hate that word ‘hulking,’ ” objected Tom crossly, “even in
- kidding.”
- “Hulking,” insisted Daisy.
- Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a
- bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool
- as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all
- desire. They were here, and they accepted Tom and me, making only a
- polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew
- that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too
- would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the
- West, where an evening was hurried from phase to phase towards its
- close, in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer
- nervous dread of the moment itself.
- “You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy,” I confessed on my second glass
- of corky but rather impressive claret. “Can’t you talk about crops or
- something?”
- I meant nothing in particular by this remark, but it was taken up in
- an unexpected way.
- “Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve
- gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise
- of the Coloured Empires by this man Goddard?”
- “Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.
- “Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is
- if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly
- submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
- “Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of
- unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in
- them. What was that word we—”
- “Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her
- impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to
- us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will
- have control of things.”
- “We’ve got to beat them down,” whispered Daisy, winking ferociously
- toward the fervent sun.
- “You ought to live in California—” began Miss Baker, but Tom
- interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.
- “This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are,
- and—” After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a
- slight nod, and she winked at me again. “—And we’ve produced all the
- things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all
- that. Do you see?”
- There was something pathetic in his concentration, as if his
- complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more.
- When, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler
- left the porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned
- towards me.
- “I’ll tell you a family secret,” she whispered enthusiastically.
- “It’s about the butler’s nose. Do you want to hear about the butler’s
- nose?”
- “That’s why I came over tonight.”
- “Well, he wasn’t always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher
- for some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred
- people. He had to polish it from morning till night, until finally it
- began to affect his nose—”
- “Things went from bad to worse,” suggested Miss Baker.
- “Yes. Things went from bad to worse, until finally he had to give up
- his position.”
- For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her
- glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I
- listened—then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering
- regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.
- The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom’s ear,
- whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair, and without a word went
- inside. As if his absence quickened something within her, Daisy leaned
- forward again, her voice glowing and singing.
- “I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a—of a rose, an
- absolute rose. Doesn’t he?” She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation:
- “An absolute rose?”
- This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only
- extemporizing, but a stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart
- was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless,
- thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and
- excused herself and went into the house.
- Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of
- meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said “Sh!”
- in a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the
- room beyond, and Miss Baker leaned forward unashamed, trying to
- hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down,
- mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether.
- “This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbour—” I began.
- “Don’t talk. I want to hear what happens.”
- “Is something happening?” I inquired innocently.
- “You mean to say you don’t know?” said Miss Baker, honestly surprised.
- “I thought everybody knew.”
- “I don’t.”
- “Why—” she said hesitantly. “Tom’s got some woman in New York.”
- “Got some woman?” I repeated blankly.
- Miss Baker nodded.
- “She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner time.
- Don’t you think?”
- Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a
- dress and the crunch of leather boots, and Tom and Daisy were back at
- the table.
- “It couldn’t be helped!” cried Daisy with tense gaiety.
- She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me, and
- continued: “I looked outdoors for a minute, and it’s very romantic
- outdoors. There’s a bird on the lawn that I think must be a
- nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He’s singing
- away—” Her voice sang: “It’s romantic, isn’t it, Tom?”
- “Very romantic,” he said, and then miserably to me: “If it’s light
- enough after dinner, I want to take you down to the stables.”
- The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head
- decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects,
- vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes
- at table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I
- was conscious of wanting to look squarely at everyone, and yet to
- avoid all eyes. I couldn’t guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking, but
- I doubt if even Miss Baker, who seemed to have mastered a certain
- hardy scepticism, was able utterly to put this fifth guest’s shrill
- metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation
- might have seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone
- immediately for the police.
- The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss
- Baker, with several feet of twilight between them, strolled back into
- the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while,
- trying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf, I followed
- Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. In
- its deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee.
- Daisy took her face in her hands as if feeling its lovely shape, and
- her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that
- turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be
- some sedative questions about her little girl.
- “We don’t know each other very well, Nick,” she said suddenly. “Even
- if we are cousins. You didn’t come to my wedding.”
- “I wasn’t back from the war.”
- “That’s true.” She hesitated. “Well, I’ve had a very bad time, Nick,
- and I’m pretty cynical about everything.”
- Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn’t say any more,
- and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her
- daughter.
- “I suppose she talks, and—eats, and everything.”
- “Oh, yes.” She looked at me absently. “Listen, Nick; let me tell you
- what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?”
- “Very much.”
- “It’ll show you how I’ve gotten to feel about—things. Well, she was
- less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of
- the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right
- away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I
- turned my head away and wept. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a
- girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be
- in this world, a beautiful little fool.’
- “You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow,” she went on in a
- convinced way. “Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people. And I
- know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.”
- Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom’s, and
- she laughed with thrilling scorn. “Sophisticated—God, I’m
- sophisticated!”
- The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my
- belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me
- uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to
- exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a
- moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face, as
- if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret
- society to which she and Tom belonged.
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light. Tom and Miss Baker sat at
- either end of the long couch and she read aloud to him from the
- Saturday Evening Post—the words, murmurous and uninflected, running
- together in a soothing tune. The lamplight, bright on his boots and
- dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as
- she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms.
- When we came in she held us silent for a moment with a lifted hand.
- “To be continued,” she said, tossing the magazine on the table, “in
- our very next issue.”
- Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she
- stood up.
- “Ten o’clock,” she remarked, apparently finding the time on the
- ceiling. “Time for this good girl to go to bed.”
- “Jordan’s going to play in the tournament tomorrow,” explained Daisy,
- “over at Westchester.”
- “Oh—you’re Jordan Baker.”
- I knew now why her face was familiar—its pleasing contemptuous
- expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of the
- sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard
- some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I
- had forgotten long ago.
- “Good night,” she said softly. “Wake me at eight, won’t you.”
- “If you’ll get up.”
- “I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon.”
- “Of course you will,” confirmed Daisy. “In fact I think I’ll arrange a
- marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I’ll sort of—oh—fling you
- together. You know—lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push
- you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing—”
- “Good night,” called Miss Baker from the stairs. “I haven’t heard a
- word.”
- “She’s a nice girl,” said Tom after a moment. “They oughtn’t to let
- her run around the country this way.”
- “Who oughtn’t to?” inquired Daisy coldly.
- “Her family.”
- “Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Nick’s
- going to look after her, aren’t you, Nick? She’s going to spend lots
- of weekends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be
- very good for her.”
- Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment in silence.
- “Is she from New York?” I asked quickly.
- “From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our
- beautiful white—”
- “Did you give Nick a little heart to heart talk on the veranda?”
- demanded Tom suddenly.
- “Did I?” She looked at me. “I can’t seem to remember, but I think we
- talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I’m sure we did. It sort of crept
- up on us and first thing you know—”
- “Don’t believe everything you hear, Nick,” he advised me.
- I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes
- later I got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood
- side by side in a cheerful square of light. As I started my motor
- Daisy peremptorily called: “Wait!
- “I forgot to ask you something, and it’s important. We heard you were
- engaged to a girl out West.”
- “That’s right,” corroborated Tom kindly. “We heard that you were
- engaged.”
- “It’s a libel. I’m too poor.”
- “But we heard it,” insisted Daisy, surprising me by opening up again
- in a flower-like way. “We heard it from three people, so it must be
- true.”
- Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn’t even
- vaguely engaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns was one
- of the reasons I had come East. You can’t stop going with an old
- friend on account of rumours, and on the other hand I had no intention
- of being rumoured into marriage.
- Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely
- rich—nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove
- away. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out
- of the house, child in arms—but apparently there were no such
- intentions in her head. As for Tom, the fact that he “had some woman
- in New York” was really less surprising than that he had been
- depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of
- stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his
- peremptory heart.
- Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside
- garages, where new red petrol-pumps sat out in pools of light, and
- when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and
- sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had
- blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the
- trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth
- blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered
- across the moonlight, and, turning my head to watch it, I saw that I
- was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of
- my neighbour’s mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets
- regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely
- movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested
- that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was
- his of our local heavens.
- I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and
- that would do for an introduction. But I didn’t call to him, for he
- gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched
- out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was
- from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced
- seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute
- and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked
- once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the
- unquiet darkness.
- II
- About halfway between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily
- joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as
- to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley
- of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and
- hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and
- chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of
- ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery
- air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track,
- gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the
- ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable
- cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.
- But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift
- endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T.
- J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and
- gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face,
- but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass
- over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set
- them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then
- sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved
- away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun
- and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
- The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and,
- when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on
- waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an
- hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute, and it was
- because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress.
- The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His
- acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular cafés
- with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with
- whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her, I had no desire
- to meet her—but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one
- afternoon, and when we stopped by the ash-heaps he jumped to his feet
- and, taking hold of my elbow, literally forced me from the car.
- “We’re getting off,” he insisted. “I want you to meet my girl.”
- I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon, and his determination
- to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption
- was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do.
- I followed him over a low whitewashed railroad fence, and we walked
- back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg’s
- persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of
- yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact
- Main Street ministering to it, and contiguous to absolutely nothing.
- One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an
- all-night restaurant, approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a
- garage—Repairs. George B. Wilson. Cars bought and sold.—and I followed
- Tom inside.
- The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the
- dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had
- occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind, and that
- sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead, when the
- proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands
- on a piece of waste. He was a blond, spiritless man, anaemic, and
- faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his
- light blue eyes.
- “Hello, Wilson, old man,” said Tom, slapping him jovially on the
- shoulder. “How’s business?”
- “I can’t complain,” answered Wilson unconvincingly. “When are you
- going to sell me that car?”
- “Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.”
- “Works pretty slow, don’t he?”
- “No, he doesn’t,” said Tom coldly. “And if you feel that way about it,
- maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.”
- “I don’t mean that,” explained Wilson quickly. “I just meant—”
- His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage.
- Then I heard footsteps on a stairs, and in a moment the thickish
- figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was
- in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her flesh
- sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark
- blue crêpe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty, but there
- was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of
- her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and, walking
- through her husband as if he were a ghost, shook hands with Tom,
- looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips, and without
- turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice:
- “Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.”
- “Oh, sure,” agreed Wilson hurriedly, and went toward the little
- office, mingling immediately with the cement colour of the walls. A
- white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled
- everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom.
- “I want to see you,” said Tom intently. “Get on the next train.”
- “All right.”
- “I’ll meet you by the newsstand on the lower level.”
- She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with
- two chairs from his office door.
- We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days
- before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was
- setting torpedoes in a row along the railroad track.
- “Terrible place, isn’t it,” said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor
- Eckleburg.
- “Awful.”
- “It does her good to get away.”
- “Doesn’t her husband object?”
- “Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He’s so
- dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.”
- So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up together to New York—or not
- quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom
- deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might
- be on the train.
- She had changed her dress to a brown figured muslin, which stretched
- tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in
- New York. At the newsstand she bought a copy of Town Tattle and a
- moving-picture magazine, and in the station drugstore some cold cream
- and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echoing drive
- she let four taxicabs drive away before she selected a new one,
- lavender-coloured with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from
- the mass of the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she
- turned sharply from the window and, leaning forward, tapped on the
- front glass.
- “I want to get one of those dogs,” she said earnestly. “I want to get
- one for the apartment. They’re nice to have—a dog.”
- We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd resemblance to John
- D. Rockefeller. In a basket swung from his neck cowered a dozen very
- recent puppies of an indeterminate breed.
- “What kind are they?” asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly, as he came to the
- taxi-window.
- “All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?”
- “I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got
- that kind?”
- The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and
- drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck.
- “That’s no police dog,” said Tom.
- “No, it’s not exactly a police dog,” said the man with disappointment
- in his voice. “It’s more of an Airedale.” He passed his hand over the
- brown washrag of a back. “Look at that coat. Some coat. That’s a dog
- that’ll never bother you with catching cold.”
- “I think it’s cute,” said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. “How much is
- it?”
- “That dog?” He looked at it admiringly. “That dog will cost you ten
- dollars.”
- The Airedale—undoubtedly there was an Airedale concerned in it
- somewhere, though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and
- settled down into Mrs. Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the
- weatherproof coat with rapture.
- “Is it a boy or a girl?” she asked delicately.
- “That dog? That dog’s a boy.”
- “It’s a bitch,” said Tom decisively. “Here’s your money. Go and buy
- ten more dogs with it.”
- We drove over to Fifth Avenue, warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the
- summer Sunday afternoon. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a great
- flock of white sheep turn the corner.
- “Hold on,” I said, “I have to leave you here.”
- “No you don’t,” interposed Tom quickly. “Myrtle’ll be hurt if you
- don’t come up to the apartment. Won’t you, Myrtle?”
- “Come on,” she urged. “I’ll telephone my sister Catherine. She’s said
- to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.”
- “Well, I’d like to, but—”
- We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds.
- At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of
- apartment-houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the
- neighbourhood, Mrs. Wilson gathered up her dog and her other
- purchases, and went haughtily in.
- “I’m going to have the McKees come up,” she announced as we rose in
- the elevator. “And, of course, I got to call up my sister, too.”
- The apartment was on the top floor—a small living-room, a small
- dining-room, a small bedroom, and a bath. The living-room was crowded
- to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for
- it, so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of
- ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an
- over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock.
- Looked at from a distance, however, the hen resolved itself into a
- bonnet, and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the
- room. Several old copies of Town Tattle lay on the table together with
- a copy of Simon Called Peter, and some of the small scandal magazines
- of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant
- elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk, to which he
- added on his own initiative a tin of large, hard dog biscuits—one of
- which decomposed apathetically in the saucer of milk all
- afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whisky from a locked
- bureau door.
- I have been drunk just twice in my life, and the second time was that
- afternoon; so everything that happened has a dim, hazy cast over it,
- although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful
- sun. Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the
- telephone; then there were no cigarettes, and I went out to buy some
- at the drugstore on the corner. When I came back they had both
- disappeared, so I sat down discreetly in the living-room and read a
- chapter of Simon Called Peter—either it was terrible stuff or the
- whisky distorted things, because it didn’t make any sense to me.
- Just as Tom and Myrtle (after the first drink Mrs. Wilson and I called
- each other by our first names) reappeared, company commenced to arrive
- at the apartment door.
- The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty,
- with a solid, sticky bob of red hair, and a complexion powdered milky
- white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more
- rakish angle, but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the
- old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about
- there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets
- jingled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary
- haste, and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I
- wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed
- immoderately, repeated my question aloud, and told me she lived with a
- girl friend at a hotel.
- Mr. McKee was a pale, feminine man from the flat below. He had just
- shaved, for there was a white spot of lather on his cheekbone, and he
- was most respectful in his greeting to everyone in the room. He
- informed me that he was in the “artistic game,” and I gathered later
- that he was a photographer and had made the dim enlargement of
- Mrs. Wilson’s mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall. His
- wife was shrill, languid, handsome, and horrible. She told me with
- pride that her husband had photographed her a hundred and twenty-seven
- times since they had been married.
- Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time before, and was now
- attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream-coloured chiffon,
- which gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room. With
- the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a
- change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage
- was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her
- assertions became more violently affected moment by moment, and as she
- expanded the room grew smaller around her, until she seemed to be
- revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.
- “My dear,” she told her sister in a high, mincing shout, “most of
- these fellas will cheat you every time. All they think of is money. I
- had a woman up here last week to look at my feet, and when she gave me
- the bill you’d of thought she had my appendicitis out.”
- “What was the name of the woman?” asked Mrs. McKee.
- “Mrs. Eberhardt. She goes around looking at people’s feet in their own
- homes.”
- “I like your dress,” remarked Mrs. McKee, “I think it’s adorable.”
- Mrs. Wilson rejected the compliment by raising her eyebrow in disdain.
- “It’s just a crazy old thing,” she said. “I just slip it on sometimes
- when I don’t care what I look like.”
- “But it looks wonderful on you, if you know what I mean,” pursued Mrs.
- McKee. “If Chester could only get you in that pose I think he could
- make something of it.”
- We all looked in silence at Mrs. Wilson, who removed a strand of hair
- from over her eyes and looked back at us with a brilliant smile. Mr.
- McKee regarded her intently with his head on one side, and then moved
- his hand back and forth slowly in front of his face.
- “I should change the light,” he said after a moment. “I’d like to
- bring out the modelling of the features. And I’d try to get hold of
- all the back hair.”
- “I wouldn’t think of changing the light,” cried Mrs. McKee. “I think
- it’s—”
- Her husband said “Sh!” and we all looked at the subject again,
- whereupon Tom Buchanan yawned audibly and got to his feet.
- “You McKees have something to drink,” he said. “Get some more ice and
- mineral water, Myrtle, before everybody goes to sleep.”
- “I told that boy about the ice.” Myrtle raised her eyebrows in despair
- at the shiftlessness of the lower orders. “These people! You have to
- keep after them all the time.”
- She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to
- the dog, kissed it with ecstasy, and swept into the kitchen, implying
- that a dozen chefs awaited her orders there.
- “I’ve done some nice things out on Long Island,” asserted Mr. McKee.
- Tom looked at him blankly.
- “Two of them we have framed downstairs.”
- “Two what?” demanded Tom.
- “Two studies. One of them I call Montauk Point—The Gulls, and the
- other I call Montauk Point—The Sea.”
- The sister Catherine sat down beside me on the couch.
- “Do you live down on Long Island, too?” she inquired.
- “I live at West Egg.”
- “Really? I was down there at a party about a month ago. At a man named
- Gatsby’s. Do you know him?”
- “I live next door to him.”
- “Well, they say he’s a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm’s. That’s
- where all his money comes from.”
- “Really?”
- She nodded.
- “I’m scared of him. I’d hate to have him get anything on me.”
- This absorbing information about my neighbour was interrupted by Mrs.
- McKee’s pointing suddenly at Catherine:
- “Chester, I think you could do something with her,” she broke out, but
- Mr. McKee only nodded in a bored way, and turned his attention to Tom.
- “I’d like to do more work on Long Island, if I could get the entry.
- All I ask is that they should give me a start.”
- “Ask Myrtle,” said Tom, breaking into a short shout of laughter as
- Mrs. Wilson entered with a tray. “She’ll give you a letter of
- introduction, won’t you, Myrtle?”
- “Do what?” she asked, startled.
- “You’ll give McKee a letter of introduction to your husband, so he can
- do some studies of him.” His lips moved silently for a moment as he
- invented, “ ‘George B. Wilson at the Gasoline Pump,’ or something like
- that.”
- Catherine leaned close to me and whispered in my ear:
- “Neither of them can stand the person they’re married to.”
- “Can’t they?”
- “Can’t stand them.” She looked at Myrtle and then at Tom. “What I say
- is, why go on living with them if they can’t stand them? If I was them
- I’d get a divorce and get married to each other right away.”
- “Doesn’t she like Wilson either?”
- The answer to this was unexpected. It came from Myrtle, who had
- overheard the question, and it was violent and obscene.
- “You see,” cried Catherine triumphantly. She lowered her voice again.
- “It’s really his wife that’s keeping them apart. She’s a Catholic, and
- they don’t believe in divorce.”
- Daisy was not a Catholic, and I was a little shocked at the
- elaborateness of the lie.
- “When they do get married,” continued Catherine, “they’re going West
- to live for a while until it blows over.”
- “It’d be more discreet to go to Europe.”
- “Oh, do you like Europe?” she exclaimed surprisingly. “I just got back
- from Monte Carlo.”
- “Really.”
- “Just last year. I went over there with another girl.”
- “Stay long?”
- “No, we just went to Monte Carlo and back. We went by way of
- Marseilles. We had over twelve hundred dollars when we started, but we
- got gyped out of it all in two days in the private rooms. We had an
- awful time getting back, I can tell you. God, how I hated that town!”
- The late afternoon sky bloomed in the window for a moment like the
- blue honey of the Mediterranean—then the shrill voice of Mrs. McKee
- called me back into the room.
- “I almost made a mistake, too,” she declared vigorously. “I almost
- married a little kike who’d been after me for years. I knew he was
- below me. Everybody kept saying to me: ‘Lucille, that man’s way below
- you!’ But if I hadn’t met Chester, he’d of got me sure.”
- “Yes, but listen,” said Myrtle Wilson, nodding her head up and down,
- “at least you didn’t marry him.”
- “I know I didn’t.”
- “Well, I married him,” said Myrtle, ambiguously. “And that’s the
- difference between your case and mine.”
- “Why did you, Myrtle?” demanded Catherine. “Nobody forced you to.”
- Myrtle considered.
- “I married him because I thought he was a gentleman,” she said
- finally. “I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn’t
- fit to lick my shoe.”
- “You were crazy about him for a while,” said Catherine.
- “Crazy about him!” cried Myrtle incredulously. “Who said I was crazy
- about him? I never was any more crazy about him than I was about that
- man there.”
- She pointed suddenly at me, and everyone looked at me accusingly. I
- tried to show by my expression that I expected no affection.
- “The only crazy I was was when I married him. I knew right away I made
- a mistake. He borrowed somebody’s best suit to get married in, and
- never even told me about it, and the man came after it one day when he
- was out: ‘Oh, is that your suit?’ I said. ‘This is the first I ever
- heard about it.’ But I gave it to him and then I lay down and cried to
- beat the band all afternoon.”
- “She really ought to get away from him,” resumed Catherine to me.
- “They’ve been living over that garage for eleven years. And Tom’s the
- first sweetie she ever had.”
- The bottle of whisky—a second one—was now in constant demand by all
- present, excepting Catherine, who “felt just as good on nothing at
- all.” Tom rang for the janitor and sent him for some celebrated
- sandwiches, which were a complete supper in themselves. I wanted to
- get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight,
- but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident
- argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet
- high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed
- their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening
- streets, and I saw him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and
- without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible
- variety of life.
- Myrtle pulled her chair close to mine, and suddenly her warm breath
- poured over me the story of her first meeting with Tom.
- “It was on the two little seats facing each other that are always the
- last ones left on the train. I was going up to New York to see my
- sister and spend the night. He had on a dress suit and patent leather
- shoes, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off him, but every time he looked
- at me I had to pretend to be looking at the advertisement over his
- head. When we came into the station he was next to me, and his white
- shirtfront pressed against my arm, and so I told him I’d have to call
- a policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so excited that when I got into
- a taxi with him I didn’t hardly know I wasn’t getting into a subway
- train. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live
- forever; you can’t live forever.’ ”
- She turned to Mrs. McKee and the room rang full of her artificial
- laughter.
- “My dear,” she cried, “I’m going to give you this dress as soon as I’m
- through with it. I’ve got to get another one tomorrow. I’m going to
- make a list of all the things I’ve got to get. A massage and a wave,
- and a collar for the dog, and one of those cute little ashtrays where
- you touch a spring, and a wreath with a black silk bow for mother’s
- grave that’ll last all summer. I got to write down a list so I won’t
- forget all the things I got to do.”
- It was nine o’clock—almost immediately afterward I looked at my watch
- and found it was ten. Mr. McKee was asleep on a chair with his fists
- clenched in his lap, like a photograph of a man of action. Taking out
- my handkerchief I wiped from his cheek the spot of dried lather that
- had worried me all the afternoon.
- The little dog was sitting on the table looking with blind eyes
- through the smoke, and from time to time groaning faintly. People
- disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost
- each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet
- away. Some time toward midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood
- face to face discussing, in impassioned voices, whether Mrs. Wilson
- had any right to mention Daisy’s name.
- “Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!” shouted Mrs. Wilson. “I’ll say it whenever I
- want to! Daisy! Dai—”
- Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his
- open hand.
- Then there were bloody towels upon the bathroom floor, and women’s
- voices scolding, and high over the confusion a long broken wail of
- pain. Mr. McKee awoke from his doze and started in a daze toward the
- door. When he had gone halfway he turned around and stared at the
- scene—his wife and Catherine scolding and consoling as they stumbled
- here and there among the crowded furniture with articles of aid, and
- the despairing figure on the couch, bleeding fluently, and trying to
- spread a copy of Town Tattle over the tapestry scenes of
- Versailles. Then Mr. McKee turned and continued on out the door.
- Taking my hat from the chandelier, I followed.
- “Come to lunch some day,” he suggested, as we groaned down in the
- elevator.
- “Where?”
- “Anywhere.”
- “Keep your hands off the lever,” snapped the elevator boy.
- “I beg your pardon,” said Mr. McKee with dignity, “I didn’t know I was
- touching it.”
- “All right,” I agreed, “I’ll be glad to.”
- … I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the
- sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.
- “Beauty and the Beast … Loneliness … Old Grocery Horse … Brook’n
- Bridge …”
- Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the
- Pennsylvania Station, staring at the morning Tribune, and waiting for
- the four o’clock train.
- III
- There was music from my neighbour’s house through the summer nights.
- In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the
- whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the
- afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or
- taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motorboats
- slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of
- foam. On weekends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties
- to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past
- midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to
- meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra
- gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers
- and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.
- Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a
- fruiterer in New York—every Monday these same oranges and lemons left
- his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in
- the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in
- half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a
- butler’s thumb.
- At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several
- hundred feet of canvas and enough coloured lights to make a Christmas
- tree of Gatsby’s enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with
- glistening hors-d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of
- harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark
- gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and
- stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that
- most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.
- By seven o’clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair,
- but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and
- cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The last swimmers have
- come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from
- New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and
- salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colours, and hair bobbed in
- strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is
- in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden
- outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual
- innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic
- meetings between women who never knew each other’s names.
- The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and
- now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of
- voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute,
- spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups
- change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the
- same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave
- here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp,
- joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph,
- glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and colour under
- the constantly changing light.
- Suddenly one of these gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail
- out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like
- Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the
- orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a
- burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda
- Gray’s understudy from the Follies. The party has begun.
- I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one
- of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not
- invited—they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out
- to Long Island, and somehow they ended up at Gatsby’s door. Once there
- they were introduced by somebody who knew Gatsby, and after that they
- conducted themselves according to the rules of behaviour associated
- with an amusement park. Sometimes they came and went without having
- met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that
- was its own ticket of admission.
- I
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