The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Great Gatsby\n\nThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and\nmost other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions\nwhatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms\nof the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online\nat www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,\nyou will have to check the laws of the country where you are located\nbefore using this eBook.\n\nTitle: The Great Gatsby\n\n\nAuthor: F. Scott Fitzgerald\n\nRelease date: January 17, 2021 [eBook #64317]\n\nLanguage: English\n\n\n\n*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREAT GATSBY ***\n\n			   The Great Gatsby\n				  by\n			 F. Scott Fitzgerald\n\n\n                           Table of Contents\n\nI\nII\nIII\nIV\nV\nVI\nVII\nVIII\nIX\n\n\n                              Once again\n                                  to\n                                 Zelda\n\n  Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;\n  If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,\n  Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,\n  I must have you!”\n\n  Thomas Parke d’Invilliers\n\n\n                                  I\n\nIn my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice\nthat I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.\n\n“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just\nremember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages\nthat you’ve had.”\n\nHe didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative\nin a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more\nthan that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgements, a\nhabit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me\nthe victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to\ndetect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal\nperson, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of\nbeing a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild,\nunknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have\nfeigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by\nsome unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on\nthe horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least\nthe terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and\nmarred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgements is a matter of\ninfinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I\nforget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly\nrepeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out\nunequally at birth.\n\nAnd, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission\nthat it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the\nwet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded\non. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted\nthe world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I\nwanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the\nhuman heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was\nexempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I\nhave an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of\nsuccessful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some\nheightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related\nto one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten\nthousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that\nflabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the\n“creative temperament”—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a\nromantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and\nwhich it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out\nall right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust\nfloated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my\ninterest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nMy family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle\nWestern city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a\nclan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of\nBuccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s\nbrother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil\nWar, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father\ncarries on today.\n\nI never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him—with\nspecial reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in\nfather’s office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of\na century after my father, and a little later I participated in that\ndelayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the\ncounter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being\nthe warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the\nragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn the bond\nbusiness. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it\ncould support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it\nover as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said,\n“Why—ye-es,” with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance\nme for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I\nthought, in the spring of twenty-two.\n\nThe practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm\nseason, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly\ntrees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a\nhouse together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He\nfound the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a\nmonth, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and\nI went out to the country alone. I had a dog—at least I had him for a\nfew days until he ran away—and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who\nmade my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to\nherself over the electric stove.\n\nIt was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more\nrecently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.\n\n“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly.\n\nI told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide,\na pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the\nfreedom of the neighbourhood.\n\nAnd so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the\ntrees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar\nconviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.\n\nThere was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to\nbe pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen\nvolumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they\nstood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint,\npromising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and\nMaecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other\nbooks besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a\nseries of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News—and now\nI was going to bring back all such things into my life and become\nagain that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.”\nThis isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at\nfrom a single window, after all.\n\nIt was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of\nthe strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender\nriotous island which extends itself due east of New York—and where\nthere are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of\nland. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in\ncontour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most\ndomesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great\nwet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals—like the\negg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact\nend—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual\nwonder to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more\ninteresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular\nexcept shape and size.\n\nI lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though\nthis is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little\nsinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the\negg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge\nplaces that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on\nmy right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual\nimitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one\nside, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble\nswimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was\nGatsby’s mansion. Or, rather, as I didn’t know Mr. Gatsby, it was a\nmansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an\neyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I\nhad a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbour’s lawn, and\nthe consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a\nmonth.\n\nAcross the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg\nglittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins\non the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom\nBuchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I’d known Tom\nin college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in\nChicago.\n\nHer husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of\nthe most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a\nnational figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute\nlimited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of\nanticlimax. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his\nfreedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago\nand come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for\ninstance, he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake\nForest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was\nwealthy enough to do that.\n\nWhy they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France for\nno particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully\nwherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a\npermanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe\nit—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift\non forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of\nsome irrecoverable football game.\n\nAnd so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East\nEgg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house\nwas even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white\nGeorgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at\nthe beach and ran towards the front door for a quarter of a mile,\njumping over sundials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when\nit reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though\nfrom the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French\nwindows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm\nwindy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with\nhis legs apart on the front porch.\n\nHe had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy\nstraw-haired man of thirty, with a rather hard mouth and a\nsupercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established\ndominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning\naggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding\nclothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill\nthose glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could\nsee a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his\nthin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.\n\nHis speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of\nfractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in\nit, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who\nhad hated his guts.\n\n“Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final,” he seemed to\nsay, “just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.” We\nwere in the same senior society, and while we were never intimate I\nalways had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like\nhim with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.\n\nWe talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.\n\n“I’ve got a nice place here,” he said, his eyes flashing about\nrestlessly.\n\nTurning me around by one arm, he moved a broad flat hand along the\nfront vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half\nacre of deep, pungent roses, and a snub-nosed motorboat that bumped\nthe tide offshore.\n\n“It belonged to Demaine, the oil man.” He turned me around again,\npolitely and abruptly. “We’ll go inside.”\n\nWe walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-coloured space,\nfragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The\nwindows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside\nthat seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through\nthe room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale\nflags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the\nceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow\non it as wind does on the sea.\n\nThe only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous\ncouch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an\nanchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were\nrippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a\nshort flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments\nlistening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a\npicture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the\nrear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the\ncurtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the\nfloor.\n\nThe younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full\nlength at her end of the divan, completely motionless, and with her\nchin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which\nwas quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes\nshe gave no hint of it—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring\nan apology for having disturbed her by coming in.\n\nThe other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she leaned slightly\nforward with a conscientious expression—then she laughed, an absurd,\ncharming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the\nroom.\n\n“I’m p-paralysed with happiness.”\n\nShe laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my\nhand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was\nno one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she\nhad. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was\nBaker. (I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people\nlean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less\ncharming.)\n\nAt any rate, Miss Baker’s lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost\nimperceptibly, and then quickly tipped her head back again—the object\nshe was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her\nsomething of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips.\nAlmost any exhibition of complete self-sufficiency draws a stunned\ntribute from me.\n\nI looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low,\nthrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and\ndown, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be\nplayed again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it,\nbright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement\nin her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget:\na singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had\ndone gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay,\nexciting things hovering in the next hour.\n\nI told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way East,\nand how a dozen people had sent their love through me.\n\n“Do they miss me?” she cried ecstatically.\n\n“The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel\npainted black as a mourning wreath, and there’s a persistent wail all\nnight along the north shore.”\n\n“How gorgeous! Let’s go back, Tom. Tomorrow!” Then she added\nirrelevantly: “You ought to see the baby.”\n\n“I’d like to.”\n\n“She’s asleep. She’s three years old. Haven’t you ever seen her?”\n\n“Never.”\n\n“Well, you ought to see her. She’s—”\n\nTom Buchanan, who had been hovering restlessly about the room, stopped\nand rested his hand on my shoulder.\n\n“What you doing, Nick?”\n\n“I’m a bond man.”\n\n“Who with?”\n\nI told him.\n\n“Never heard of them,” he remarked decisively.\n\nThis annoyed me.\n\n“You will,” I answered shortly. “You will if you stay in the East.”\n\n“Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry,” he said, glancing at\nDaisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something\nmore. “I’d be a God damned fool to live anywhere else.”\n\nAt this point Miss Baker said: “Absolutely!” with such suddenness that\nI started—it was the first word she had uttered since I came into the\nroom. Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned\nand with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.\n\n“I’m stiff,” she complained, “I’ve been lying on that sofa for as long\nas I can remember.”\n\n“Don’t look at me,” Daisy retorted, “I’ve been trying to get you to\nNew York all afternoon.”\n\n“No, thanks,” said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the\npantry. “I’m absolutely in training.”\n\nHer host looked at her incredulously.\n\n“You are!” He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom\nof a glass. “How you ever get anything done is beyond me.”\n\nI looked at Miss Baker, wondering what it was she “got done.” I\nenjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with\nan erect carriage, which she accentuated by throwing her body backward\nat the shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked\nback at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming,\ndiscontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a\npicture of her, somewhere before.\n\n“You live in West Egg,” she remarked contemptuously. “I know somebody\nthere.”\n\n“I don’t know a single—”\n\n“You must know Gatsby.”\n\n“Gatsby?” demanded Daisy. “What Gatsby?”\n\nBefore I could reply that he was my neighbour dinner was announced;\nwedging his tense arm imperatively under mine, Tom Buchanan compelled\nme from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.\n\nSlenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips, the two\nyoung women preceded us out on to a rosy-coloured porch, open toward\nthe sunset, where four candles flickered on the table in the\ndiminished wind.\n\n“Why candles?” objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her\nfingers. “In two weeks it’ll be the longest day in the year.” She\nlooked at us all radiantly. “Do you always watch for the longest day\nof the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in\nthe year and then miss it.”\n\n“We ought to plan something,” yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the\ntable as if she were getting into bed.\n\n“All right,” said Daisy. “What’ll we plan?” She turned to me\nhelplessly: “What do people plan?”\n\nBefore I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her\nlittle finger.\n\n“Look!” she complained; “I hurt it.”\n\nWe all looked—the knuckle was black and blue.\n\n“You did it, Tom,” she said accusingly. “I know you didn’t mean to,\nbut you did do it. That’s what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a\ngreat, big, hulking physical specimen of a—”\n\n“I hate that word ‘hulking,’ ” objected Tom crossly, “even in\nkidding.”\n\n“Hulking,” insisted Daisy.\n\nSometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a\nbantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool\nas their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all\ndesire. They were here, and they accepted Tom and me, making only a\npolite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew\nthat presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too\nwould be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the\nWest, where an evening was hurried from phase to phase towards its\nclose, in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer\nnervous dread of the moment itself.\n\n“You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy,” I confessed on my second glass\nof corky but rather impressive claret. “Can’t you talk about crops or\nsomething?”\n\nI meant nothing in particular by this remark, but it was taken up in\nan unexpected way.\n\n“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve\ngotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise\nof the Coloured Empires by this man Goddard?”\n\n“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.\n\n“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is\nif we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly\nsubmerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”\n\n“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of\nunthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in\nthem. What was that word we—”\n\n“Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her\nimpatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to\nus, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will\nhave control of things.”\n\n“We’ve got to beat them down,” whispered Daisy, winking ferociously\ntoward the fervent sun.\n\n“You ought to live in California—” began Miss Baker, but Tom\ninterrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.\n\n“This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are,\nand—” After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a\nslight nod, and she winked at me again. “—And we’ve produced all the\nthings that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all\nthat. Do you see?”\n\nThere was something pathetic in his concentration, as if his\ncomplacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more.\nWhen, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler\nleft the porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned\ntowards me.\n\n“I’ll tell you a family secret,” she whispered enthusiastically.\n“It’s about the butler’s nose. Do you want to hear about the butler’s\nnose?”\n\n“That’s why I came over tonight.”\n\n“Well, he wasn’t always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher\nfor some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred\npeople. He had to polish it from morning till night, until finally it\nbegan to affect his nose—”\n\n“Things went from bad to worse,” suggested Miss Baker.\n\n“Yes. Things went from bad to worse, until finally he had to give up\nhis position.”\n\nFor a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her\nglowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I\nlistened—then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering\nregret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.\n\nThe butler came back and murmured something close to Tom’s ear,\nwhereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair, and without a word went\ninside. As if his absence quickened something within her, Daisy leaned\nforward again, her voice glowing and singing.\n\n“I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a—of a rose, an\nabsolute rose. Doesn’t he?” She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation:\n“An absolute rose?”\n\nThis was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only\nextemporizing, but a stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart\nwas trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless,\nthrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and\nexcused herself and went into the house.\n\nMiss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of\nmeaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said “Sh!”\nin a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the\nroom beyond, and Miss Baker leaned forward unashamed, trying to\nhear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down,\nmounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether.\n\n“This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbour—” I began.\n\n“Don’t talk. I want to hear what happens.”\n\n“Is something happening?” I inquired innocently.\n\n“You mean to say you don’t know?” said Miss Baker, honestly surprised.\n“I thought everybody knew.”\n\n“I don’t.”\n\n“Why—” she said hesitantly. “Tom’s got some woman in New York.”\n\n“Got some woman?” I repeated blankly.\n\nMiss Baker nodded.\n\n“She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner time.\nDon’t you think?”\n\nAlmost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a\ndress and the crunch of leather boots, and Tom and Daisy were back at\nthe table.\n\n“It couldn’t be helped!” cried Daisy with tense gaiety.\n\nShe sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me, and\ncontinued: “I looked outdoors for a minute, and it’s very romantic\noutdoors. There’s a bird on the lawn that I think must be a\nnightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He’s singing\naway—” Her voice sang: “It’s romantic, isn’t it, Tom?”\n\n“Very romantic,” he said, and then miserably to me: “If it’s light\nenough after dinner, I want to take you down to the stables.”\n\nThe telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head\ndecisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects,\nvanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes\nat table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I\nwas conscious of wanting to look squarely at everyone, and yet to\navoid all eyes. I couldn’t guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking, but\nI doubt if even Miss Baker, who seemed to have mastered a certain\nhardy scepticism, was able utterly to put this fifth guest’s shrill\nmetallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation\nmight have seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone\nimmediately for the police.\n\nThe horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss\nBaker, with several feet of twilight between them, strolled back into\nthe library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while,\ntrying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf, I followed\nDaisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. In\nits deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee.\n\nDaisy took her face in her hands as if feeling its lovely shape, and\nher eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that\nturbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be\nsome sedative questions about her little girl.\n\n“We don’t know each other very well, Nick,” she said suddenly. “Even\nif we are cousins. You didn’t come to my wedding.”\n\n“I wasn’t back from the war.”\n\n“That’s true.” She hesitated. “Well, I’ve had a very bad time, Nick,\nand I’m pretty cynical about everything.”\n\nEvidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn’t say any more,\nand after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her\ndaughter.\n\n“I suppose she talks, and—eats, and everything.”\n\n“Oh, yes.” She looked at me absently. “Listen, Nick; let me tell you\nwhat I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?”\n\n“Very much.”\n\n“It’ll show you how I’ve gotten to feel about—things. Well, she was\nless than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of\nthe ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right\naway if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I\nturned my head away and wept. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a\ngirl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be\nin this world, a beautiful little fool.’\n\n“You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow,” she went on in a\nconvinced way. “Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people. And I\nknow. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.”\nHer eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom’s, and\nshe laughed with thrilling scorn. “Sophisticated—God, I’m\nsophisticated!”\n\nThe instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my\nbelief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me\nuneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to\nexact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a\nmoment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face, as\nif she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret\nsociety to which she and Tom belonged.\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nInside, the crimson room bloomed with light. Tom and Miss Baker sat at\neither end of the long couch and she read aloud to him from the\nSaturday Evening Post—the words, murmurous and uninflected, running\ntogether in a soothing tune. The lamplight, bright on his boots and\ndull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as\nshe turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms.\n\nWhen we came in she held us silent for a moment with a lifted hand.\n\n“To be continued,” she said, tossing the magazine on the table, “in\nour very next issue.”\n\nHer body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she\nstood up.\n\n“Ten o’clock,” she remarked, apparently finding the time on the\nceiling. “Time for this good girl to go to bed.”\n\n“Jordan’s going to play in the tournament tomorrow,” explained Daisy,\n“over at Westchester.”\n\n“Oh—you’re Jordan Baker.”\n\nI knew now why her face was familiar—its pleasing contemptuous\nexpression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of the\nsporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard\nsome story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I\nhad forgotten long ago.\n\n“Good night,” she said softly. “Wake me at eight, won’t you.”\n\n“If you’ll get up.”\n\n“I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon.”\n\n“Of course you will,” confirmed Daisy. “In fact I think I’ll arrange a\nmarriage. Come over often, Nick, and I’ll sort of—oh—fling you\ntogether. You know—lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push\nyou out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing—”\n\n“Good night,” called Miss Baker from the stairs. “I haven’t heard a\nword.”\n\n“She’s a nice girl,” said Tom after a moment. “They oughtn’t to let\nher run around the country this way.”\n\n“Who oughtn’t to?” inquired Daisy coldly.\n\n“Her family.”\n\n“Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Nick’s\ngoing to look after her, aren’t you, Nick? She’s going to spend lots\nof weekends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be\nvery good for her.”\n\nDaisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment in silence.\n\n“Is she from New York?” I asked quickly.\n\n“From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our\nbeautiful white—”\n\n“Did you give Nick a little heart to heart talk on the veranda?”\ndemanded Tom suddenly.\n\n“Did I?” She looked at me. “I can’t seem to remember, but I think we\ntalked about the Nordic race. Yes, I’m sure we did. It sort of crept\nup on us and first thing you know—”\n\n“Don’t believe everything you hear, Nick,” he advised me.\n\nI said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes\nlater I got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood\nside by side in a cheerful square of light. As I started my motor\nDaisy peremptorily called: “Wait!”\n\n“I forgot to ask you something, and it’s important. We heard you were\nengaged to a girl out West.”\n\n“That’s right,” corroborated Tom kindly. “We heard that you were\nengaged.”\n\n“It’s a libel. I’m too poor.”\n\n“But we heard it,” insisted Daisy, surprising me by opening up again\nin a flower-like way. “We heard it from three people, so it must be\ntrue.”\n\nOf course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn’t even\nvaguely engaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns was one\nof the reasons I had come East. You can’t stop going with an old\nfriend on account of rumours, and on the other hand I had no intention\nof being rumoured into marriage.\n\nTheir interest rather touched me and made them less remotely\nrich—nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove\naway. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out\nof the house, child in arms—but apparently there were no such\nintentions in her head. As for Tom, the fact that he “had some woman\nin New York” was really less surprising than that he had been\ndepressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of\nstale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his\nperemptory heart.\n\nAlready it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside\ngarages, where new red petrol-pumps sat out in pools of light, and\nwhen I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and\nsat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had\nblown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the\ntrees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth\nblew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered\nacross the moonlight, and, turning my head to watch it, I saw that I\nwas not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of\nmy neighbour’s mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets\nregarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely\nmovements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested\nthat it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was\nhis of our local heavens.\n\nI decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and\nthat would do for an introduction. But I didn’t call to him, for he\ngave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched\nout his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was\nfrom him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced\nseaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute\nand far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked\nonce more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the\nunquiet darkness.\n\n\n                                  II\n\nAbout halfway between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily\njoins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as\nto shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley\nof ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and\nhills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and\nchimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of\nash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery\nair. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track,\ngives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the\nash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable\ncloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.\n\nBut above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift\nendlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T.\nJ. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and\ngigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face,\nbut, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass\nover a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set\nthem there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then\nsank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved\naway. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun\nand rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.\n\nThe valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and,\nwhen the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on\nwaiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an\nhour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute, and it was\nbecause of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress.\n\nThe fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His\nacquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular cafés\nwith her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with\nwhomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her, I had no desire\nto meet her—but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one\nafternoon, and when we stopped by the ash-heaps he jumped to his feet\nand, taking hold of my elbow, literally forced me from the car.\n\n“We’re getting off,” he insisted. “I want you to meet my girl.”\n\nI think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon, and his determination\nto have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption\nwas that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do.\n\nI followed him over a low whitewashed railroad fence, and we walked\nback a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg’s\npersistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of\nyellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact\nMain Street ministering to it, and contiguous to absolutely nothing.\nOne of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an\nall-night restaurant, approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a\ngarage—Repairs. George B. Wilson. Cars bought and sold.—and I followed\nTom inside.\n\nThe interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the\ndust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had\noccurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind, and that\nsumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead, when the\nproprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands\non a piece of waste. He was a blond, spiritless man, anaemic, and\nfaintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his\nlight blue eyes.\n\n“Hello, Wilson, old man,” said Tom, slapping him jovially on the\nshoulder. “How’s business?”\n\n“I can’t complain,” answered Wilson unconvincingly. “When are you\ngoing to sell me that car?”\n\n“Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.”\n\n“Works pretty slow, don’t he?”\n\n“No, he doesn’t,” said Tom coldly. “And if you feel that way about it,\nmaybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.”\n\n“I don’t mean that,” explained Wilson quickly. “I just meant—”\n\nHis voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage.\nThen I heard footsteps on a stairs, and in a moment the thickish\nfigure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was\nin the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her flesh\nsensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark\nblue crêpe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty, but there\nwas an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of\nher body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and, walking\nthrough her husband as if he were a ghost, shook hands with Tom,\nlooking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips, and without\nturning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice:\n\n“Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.”\n\n“Oh, sure,” agreed Wilson hurriedly, and went toward the little\noffice, mingling immediately with the cement colour of the walls. A\nwhite ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled\neverything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom.\n\n“I want to see you,” said Tom intently. “Get on the next train.”\n\n“All right.”\n\n“I’ll meet you by the newsstand on the lower level.”\n\nShe nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with\ntwo chairs from his office door.\n\nWe waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days\nbefore the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was\nsetting torpedoes in a row along the railroad track.\n\n“Terrible place, isn’t it,” said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor\nEckleburg.\n\n“Awful.”\n\n“It does her good to get away.”\n\n“Doesn’t her husband object?”\n\n“Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He’s so\ndumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.”\n\nSo Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up together to New York—or not\nquite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom\ndeferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might\nbe on the train.\n\nShe had changed her dress to a brown figured muslin, which stretched\ntight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in\nNew York. At the newsstand she bought a copy of Town Tattle and a\nmoving-picture magazine, and in the station drugstore some cold cream\nand a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echoing drive\nshe let four taxicabs drive away before she selected a new one,\nlavender-coloured with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from\nthe mass of the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she\nturned sharply from the window and, leaning forward, tapped on the\nfront glass.\n\n“I want to get one of those dogs,” she said earnestly. “I want to get\none for the apartment. They’re nice to have—a dog.”\n\nWe backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd resemblance to John\nD. Rockefeller. In a basket swung from his neck cowered a dozen very\nrecent puppies of an indeterminate breed.\n\n“What kind are they?” asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly, as he came to the\ntaxi-window.\n\n“All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?”\n\n“I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got\nthat kind?”\n\nThe man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and\ndrew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck.\n\n“That’s no police dog,” said Tom.\n\n“No, it’s not exactly a police dog,” said the man with disappointment\nin his voice. “It’s more of an Airedale.” He passed his hand over the\nbrown washrag of a back. “Look at that coat. Some coat. That’s a dog\nthat’ll never bother you with catching cold.”\n\n“I think it’s cute,” said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. “How much is\nit?”\n\n“That dog?” He looked at it admiringly. “That dog will cost you ten\ndollars.”\n\nThe Airedale—undoubtedly there was an Airedale concerned in it\nsomewhere, though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and\nsettled down into Mrs. Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the\nweatherproof coat with rapture.\n\n“Is it a boy or a girl?” she asked delicately.\n\n“That dog? That dog’s a boy.”\n\n“It’s a bitch,” said Tom decisively. “Here’s your money. Go and buy\nten more dogs with it.”\n\nWe drove over to Fifth Avenue, warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the\nsummer Sunday afternoon. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a great\nflock of white sheep turn the corner.\n\n“Hold on,” I said, “I have to leave you here.”\n\n“No you don’t,” interposed Tom quickly. “Myrtle’ll be hurt if you\ndon’t come up to the apartment. Won’t you, Myrtle?”\n\n“Come on,” she urged. “I’ll telephone my sister Catherine. She’s said\nto be very beautiful by people who ought to know.”\n\n“Well, I’d like to, but—”\n\nWe went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds.\nAt 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of\napartment-houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the\nneighbourhood, Mrs. Wilson gathered up her dog and her other\npurchases, and went haughtily in.\n\n“I’m going to have the McKees come up,” she announced as we rose in\nthe elevator. “And, of course, I got to call up my sister, too.”\n\nThe apartment was on the top floor—a small living-room, a small\ndining-room, a small bedroom, and a bath. The living-room was crowded\nto the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for\nit, so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of\nladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an\nover-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock.\nLooked at from a distance, however, the hen resolved itself into a\nbonnet, and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the\nroom. Several old copies of Town Tattle lay on the table together with\na copy of Simon Called Peter, and some of the small scandal magazines\nof Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant\nelevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk, to which he\nadded on his own initiative a tin of large, hard dog biscuits—one of\nwhich decomposed apathetically in the saucer of milk all\nafternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whisky from a locked\nbureau door.\n\nI have been drunk just twice in my life, and the second time was that\nafternoon; so everything that happened has a dim, hazy cast over it,\nalthough until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful\nsun. Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the\ntelephone; then there were no cigarettes, and I went out to buy some\nat the drugstore on the corner. When I came back they had both\ndisappeared, so I sat down discreetly in the living-room and read a\nchapter of Simon Called Peter—either it was terrible stuff or the\nwhisky distorted things, because it didn’t make any sense to me.\n\nJust as Tom and Myrtle (after the first drink Mrs. Wilson and I called\neach other by our first names) reappeared, company commenced to arrive\nat the apartment door.\n\nThe sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty,\nwith a solid, sticky bob of red hair, and a complexion powdered milky\nwhite. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more\nrakish angle, but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the\nold alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about\nthere was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets\njingled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary\nhaste, and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I\nwondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed\nimmoderately, repeated my question aloud, and told me she lived with a\ngirl friend at a hotel.\n\nMr. McKee was a pale, feminine man from the flat below. He had just\nshaved, for there was a white spot of lather on his cheekbone, and he\nwas most respectful in his greeting to everyone in the room. He\ninformed me that he was in the “artistic game,” and I gathered later\nthat he was a photographer and had made the dim enlargement of\nMrs. Wilson’s mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall. His\nwife was shrill, languid, handsome, and horrible. She told me with\npride that her husband had photographed her a hundred and twenty-seven\ntimes since they had been married.\n\nMrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time before, and was now\nattired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream-coloured chiffon,\nwhich gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room. With\nthe influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a\nchange. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage\nwas converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her\nassertions became more violently affected moment by moment, and as she\nexpanded the room grew smaller around her, until she seemed to be\nrevolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.\n\n“My dear,” she told her sister in a high, mincing shout, “most of\nthese fellas will cheat you every time. All they think of is money. I\nhad a woman up here last week to look at my feet, and when she gave me\nthe bill you’d of thought she had my appendicitis out.”\n\n“What was the name of the woman?” asked Mrs. McKee.\n\n“Mrs. Eberhardt. She goes around looking at people’s feet in their own\nhomes.”\n\n“I like your dress,” remarked Mrs. McKee, “I think it’s adorable.”\n\nMrs. Wilson rejected the compliment by raising her eyebrow in disdain.\n\n“It’s just a crazy old thing,” she said. “I just slip it on sometimes\nwhen I don’t care what I look like.”\n\n“But it looks wonderful on you, if you know what I mean,” pursued Mrs.\nMcKee. “If Chester could only get you in that pose I think he could\nmake something of it.”\n\nWe all looked in silence at Mrs. Wilson, who removed a strand of hair\nfrom over her eyes and looked back at us with a brilliant smile. Mr.\nMcKee regarded her intently with his head on one side, and then moved\nhis hand back and forth slowly in front of his face.\n\n“I should change the light,” he said after a moment. “I’d like to\nbring out the modelling of the features. And I’d try to get hold of\nall the back hair.”\n\n“I wouldn’t think of changing the light,” cried Mrs. McKee. “I think\nit’s—”\n\nHer husband said “Sh!” and we all looked at the subject again,\nwhereupon Tom Buchanan yawned audibly and got to his feet.\n\n“You McKees have something to drink,” he said. “Get some more ice and\nmineral water, Myrtle, before everybody goes to sleep.”\n\n“I told that boy about the ice.” Myrtle raised her eyebrows in despair\nat the shiftlessness of the lower orders. “These people! You have to\nkeep after them all the time.”\n\nShe looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to\nthe dog, kissed it with ecstasy, and swept into the kitchen, implying\nthat a dozen chefs awaited her orders there.\n\n“I’ve done some nice things out on Long Island,” asserted Mr. McKee.\n\nTom looked at him blankly.\n\n“Two of them we have framed downstairs.”\n\n“Two what?” demanded Tom.\n\n“Two studies. One of them I call Montauk Point—The Gulls, and the\nother I call Montauk Point—The Sea.”\n\nThe sister Catherine sat down beside me on the couch.\n\n“Do you live down on Long Island, too?” she inquired.\n\n“I live at West Egg.”\n\n“Really? I was down there at a party about a month ago. At a man named\nGatsby’s. Do you know him?”\n\n“I live next door to him.”\n\n“Well, they say he’s a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm’s. That’s\nwhere all his money comes from.”\n\n“Really?”\n\nShe nodded.\n\n“I’m scared of him. I’d hate to have him get anything on me.”\n\nThis absorbing information about my neighbour was interrupted by Mrs.\nMcKee’s pointing suddenly at Catherine:\n\n“Chester, I think you could do something with her,” she broke out, but\nMr. McKee only nodded in a bored way, and turned his attention to Tom.\n\n“I’d like to do more work on Long Island, if I could get the entry.\nAll I ask is that they should give me a start.”\n\n“Ask Myrtle,” said Tom, breaking into a short shout of laughter as\nMrs. Wilson entered with a tray. “She’ll give you a letter of\nintroduction, won’t you, Myrtle?”\n\n“Do what?” she asked, startled.\n\n“You’ll give McKee a letter of introduction to your husband, so he can\ndo some studies of him.” His lips moved silently for a moment as he\ninvented, “ ‘George B. Wilson at the Gasoline Pump,’ or something like\nthat.”\n\nCatherine leaned close to me and whispered in my ear:\n\n“Neither of them can stand the person they’re married to.”\n\n“Can’t they?”\n\n“Can’t stand them.” She looked at Myrtle and then at Tom. “What I say\nis, why go on living with them if they can’t stand them? If I was them\nI’d get a divorce and get married to each other right away.”\n\n“Doesn’t she like Wilson either?”\n\nThe answer to this was unexpected. It came from Myrtle, who had\noverheard the question, and it was violent and obscene.\n\n“You see,” cried Catherine triumphantly. She lowered her voice again.\n“It’s really his wife that’s keeping them apart. She’s a Catholic, and\nthey don’t believe in divorce.”\n\nDaisy was not a Catholic, and I was a little shocked at the\nelaborateness of the lie.\n\n“When they do get married,” continued Catherine, “they’re going West\nto live for a while until it blows over.”\n\n“It’d be more discreet to go to Europe.”\n\n“Oh, do you like Europe?” she exclaimed surprisingly. “I just got back\nfrom Monte Carlo.”\n\n“Really.”\n\n“Just last year. I went over there with another girl.”\n\n“Stay long?”\n\n“No, we just went to Monte Carlo and back. We went by way of\nMarseilles. We had over twelve hundred dollars when we started, but we\ngot gyped out of it all in two days in the private rooms. We had an\nawful time getting back, I can tell you. God, how I hated that town!”\n\nThe late afternoon sky bloomed in the window for a moment like the\nblue honey of the Mediterranean—then the shrill voice of Mrs. McKee\ncalled me back into the room.\n\n“I almost made a mistake, too,” she declared vigorously. “I almost\nmarried a little kike who’d been after me for years. I knew he was\nbelow me. Everybody kept saying to me: ‘Lucille, that man’s way below\nyou!’ But if I hadn’t met Chester, he’d of got me sure.”\n\n“Yes, but listen,” said Myrtle Wilson, nodding her head up and down,\n“at least you didn’t marry him.”\n\n“I know I didn’t.”\n\n“Well, I married him,” said Myrtle, ambiguously. “And that’s the\ndifference between your case and mine.”\n\n“Why did you, Myrtle?” demanded Catherine. “Nobody forced you to.”\n\nMyrtle considered.\n\n“I married him because I thought he was a gentleman,” she said\nfinally. “I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn’t\nfit to lick my shoe.”\n\n“You were crazy about him for a while,” said Catherine.\n\n“Crazy about him!” cried Myrtle incredulously. “Who said I was crazy\nabout him? I never was any more crazy about him than I was about that\nman there.”\n\nShe pointed suddenly at me, and everyone looked at me accusingly. I\ntried to show by my expression that I expected no affection.\n\n“The only crazy I was was when I married him. I knew right away I made\na mistake. He borrowed somebody’s best suit to get married in, and\nnever even told me about it, and the man came after it one day when he\nwas out: ‘Oh, is that your suit?’ I said. ‘This is the first I ever\nheard about it.’ But I gave it to him and then I lay down and cried to\nbeat the band all afternoon.”\n\n“She really ought to get away from him,” resumed Catherine to me.\n“They’ve been living over that garage for eleven years. And Tom’s the\nfirst sweetie she ever had.”\n\nThe bottle of whisky—a second one—was now in constant demand by all\npresent, excepting Catherine, who “felt just as good on nothing at\nall.” Tom rang for the janitor and sent him for some celebrated\nsandwiches, which were a complete supper in themselves. I wanted to\nget out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight,\nbut each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident\nargument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet\nhigh over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed\ntheir share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening\nstreets, and I saw him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and\nwithout, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible\nvariety of life.\n\nMyrtle pulled her chair close to mine, and suddenly her warm breath\npoured over me the story of her first meeting with Tom.\n\n“It was on the two little seats facing each other that are always the\nlast ones left on the train. I was going up to New York to see my\nsister and spend the night. He had on a dress suit and patent leather\nshoes, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off him, but every time he looked\nat me I had to pretend to be looking at the advertisement over his\nhead. When we came into the station he was next to me, and his white\nshirtfront pressed against my arm, and so I told him I’d have to call\na policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so excited that when I got into\na taxi with him I didn’t hardly know I wasn’t getting into a subway\ntrain. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live\nforever; you can’t live forever.’ ”\n\nShe turned to Mrs. McKee and the room rang full of her artificial\nlaughter.\n\n“My dear,” she cried, “I’m going to give you this dress as soon as I’m\nthrough with it. I’ve got to get another one tomorrow. I’m going to\nmake a list of all the things I’ve got to get. A massage and a wave,\nand a collar for the dog, and one of those cute little ashtrays where\nyou touch a spring, and a wreath with a black silk bow for mother’s\ngrave that’ll last all summer. I got to write down a list so I won’t\nforget all the things I got to do.”\n\nIt was nine o’clock—almost immediately afterward I looked at my watch\nand found it was ten. Mr. McKee was asleep on a chair with his fists\nclenched in his lap, like a photograph of a man of action. Taking out\nmy handkerchief I wiped from his cheek the spot of dried lather that\nhad worried me all the afternoon.\n\nThe little dog was sitting on the table looking with blind eyes\nthrough the smoke, and from time to time groaning faintly. People\ndisappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost\neach other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet\naway. Some time toward midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood\nface to face discussing, in impassioned voices, whether Mrs. Wilson\nhad any right to mention Daisy’s name.\n\n“Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!” shouted Mrs. Wilson. “I’ll say it whenever I\nwant to! Daisy! Dai—”\n\nMaking a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his\nopen hand.\n\nThen there were bloody towels upon the bathroom floor, and women’s\nvoices scolding, and high over the confusion a long broken wail of\npain. Mr. McKee awoke from his doze and started in a daze toward the\ndoor. When he had gone halfway he turned around and stared at the\nscene—his wife and Catherine scolding and consoling as they stumbled\nhere and there among the crowded furniture with articles of aid, and\nthe despairing figure on the couch, bleeding fluently, and trying to\nspread a copy of Town Tattle over the tapestry scenes of\nVersailles. Then Mr. McKee turned and continued on out the door.\nTaking my hat from the chandelier, I followed.\n\n“Come to lunch some day,” he suggested, as we groaned down in the\nelevator.\n\n“Where?”\n\n“Anywhere.”\n\n“Keep your hands off the lever,” snapped the elevator boy.\n\n“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. McKee with dignity, “I didn’t know I was\ntouching it.”\n\n“All right,” I agreed, “I’ll be glad to.”\n\n… I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the\nsheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.\n\n“Beauty and the Beast … Loneliness … Old Grocery Horse … Brook’n\nBridge …”\n\nThen I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the\nPennsylvania Station, staring at the morning Tribune, and waiting for\nthe four o’clock train.\n\n\n                                 III\n\nThere was music from my neighbour’s house through the summer nights.\nIn his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the\nwhisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the\nafternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or\ntaking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motorboats\nslit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of\nfoam. On weekends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties\nto and from the city between nine in the morning and long past\nmidnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to\nmeet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra\ngardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers\nand garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.\n\nEvery Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a\nfruiterer in New York—every Monday these same oranges and lemons left\nhis back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in\nthe kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in\nhalf an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a\nbutler’s thumb.\n\nAt least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several\nhundred feet of canvas and enough coloured lights to make a Christmas\ntree of Gatsby’s enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with\nglistening hors-d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of\nharlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark\ngold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and\nstocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that\nmost of his female guests were too young to know one from another.\n\nBy seven o’clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair,\nbut a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and\ncornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The last swimmers have\ncome in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from\nNew York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and\nsalons and verandas are gaudy with primary colours, and hair bobbed in\nstrange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is\nin full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden\noutside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual\ninnuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic\nmeetings between women who never knew each other’s names.\n\nThe lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and\nnow the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of\nvoices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute,\nspilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups\nchange more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the\nsame breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave\nhere and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp,\njoyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph,\nglide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and colour under\nthe constantly changing light.\n\nSuddenly one of these gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail\nout of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like\nFrisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the\norchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a\nburst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda\nGray’s understudy from the Follies. The party has begun.\n\nI believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one\nof the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not\ninvited—they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out\nto Long Island, and somehow they ended up at Gatsby’s door. Once there\nthey were introduced by somebody who knew Gatsby, and after that they\nconducted themselves according to the rules of behaviour associated\nwith an amusement park. Sometimes they came and went without having\nmet Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that\nwas its own ticket of admission.\n\nI had been actually invited. A chauffeur in a uniform of robin’s-egg\nblue crossed my lawn early that Saturday morning with a surprisingly\nformal note from his employer: the honour would be entirely Gatsby’s,\nit said, if I would attend his “little party” that night. He had seen\nme several times, and had intended to call on me long before, but a\npeculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it—signed Jay\nGatsby, in a majestic hand.\n\nDressed up in white flannels I went over to his lawn a little after\nseven, and wandered around rather ill at ease among swirls and eddies\nof people I didn’t know—though here and there was a face I had noticed\non the commuting train. I was immediately struck by the number of\nyoung Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little\nhungry, and all talking in low, earnest voices to solid and prosperous\nAmericans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or\ninsurance or automobiles. They were at least agonizingly aware of the\neasy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few\nwords in the right key.\n\nAs soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host, but the two or\nthree people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an\namazed way, and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements,\nthat I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table—the only place\nin the garden where a single man could linger without looking\npurposeless and alone.\n\nI was on my way to get roaring drunk from sheer embarrassment when\nJordan Baker came out of the house and stood at the head of the marble\nsteps, leaning a little backward and looking with contemptuous\ninterest down into the garden.\n\nWelcome or not, I found it necessary to attach myself to someone\nbefore I should begin to address cordial remarks to the passersby.\n\n“Hello!” I roared, advancing toward her. My voice seemed unnaturally\nloud across the garden.\n\n“I thought you might be here,” she responded absently as I came up.\n“I remembered you lived next door to—”\n\nShe held my hand impersonally, as a promise that she’d take care of me\nin a minute, and gave ear to two girls in twin yellow dresses, who\nstopped at the foot of the steps.\n\n“Hello!” they cried together. “Sorry you didn’t win.”\n\nThat was for the golf tournament. She had lost in the finals the week\nbefore.\n\n“You don’t know who we are,” said one of the girls in yellow, “but we\nmet you here about a month ago.”\n\n“You’ve dyed your hair since then,” remarked Jordan, and I started,\nbut the girls had moved casually on and her remark was addressed to\nthe premature moon, produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a\ncaterer’s basket. With Jordan’s slender golden arm resting in mine, we\ndescended the steps and sauntered about the garden. A tray of\ncocktails floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a\ntable with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced\nto us as Mr. Mumble.\n\n“Do you come to these parties often?” inquired Jordan of the girl\nbeside her.\n\n“The last one was the one I met you at,” answered the girl, in an\nalert confident voice. She turned to her companion: “Wasn’t it for\nyou, Lucille?”\n\nIt was for Lucille, too.\n\n“I like to come,” Lucille said. “I never care what I do, so I always\nhave a good time. When I was here last I tore my gown on a chair, and\nhe asked me my name and address—inside of a week I got a package from\nCroirier’s with a new evening gown in it.”\n\n“Did you keep it?” asked Jordan.\n\n“Sure I did. I was going to wear it tonight, but it was too big in the\nbust and had to be altered. It was gas blue with lavender beads. Two\nhundred and sixty-five dollars.”\n\n“There’s something funny about a fellow that’ll do a thing like that,”\nsaid the other girl eagerly. “He doesn’t want any trouble with\nanybody.”\n\n“Who doesn’t?” I inquired.\n\n“Gatsby. Somebody told me—”\n\nThe two girls and Jordan leaned together confidentially.\n\n“Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.”\n\nA thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and\nlistened eagerly.\n\n“I don’t think it’s so much that,” argued Lucille sceptically; “It’s\nmore that he was a German spy during the war.”\n\nOne of the men nodded in confirmation.\n\n“I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in\nGermany,” he assured us positively.\n\n“Oh, no,” said the first girl, “it couldn’t be that, because he was in\nthe American army during the war.” As our credulity switched back to\nher she leaned forward with enthusiasm. “You look at him sometimes\nwhen he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man.”\n\nShe narrowed her eyes and shivered. Lucille shivered. We all turned\nand looked around for Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic\nspeculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those\nwho had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this\nworld.\n\nThe first supper—there would be another one after midnight—was now\nbeing served, and Jordan invited me to join her own party, who were\nspread around a table on the other side of the garden. There were\nthree married couples and Jordan’s escort, a persistent undergraduate\ngiven to violent innuendo, and obviously under the impression that\nsooner or later Jordan was going to yield him up her person to a\ngreater or lesser degree. Instead of rambling, this party had\npreserved a dignified homogeneity, and assumed to itself the function\nof representing the staid nobility of the countryside—East Egg\ncondescending to West Egg and carefully on guard against its\nspectroscopic gaiety.\n\n“Let’s get out,” whispered Jordan, after a somehow wasteful and\ninappropriate half-hour; “this is much too polite for me.”\n\nWe got up, and she explained that we were going to find the host: I\nhad never met him, she said, and it was making me uneasy. The\nundergraduate nodded in a cynical, melancholy way.\n\nThe bar, where we glanced first, was crowded, but Gatsby was not\nthere. She couldn’t find him from the top of the steps, and he wasn’t\non the veranda. On a chance we tried an important-looking door, and\nwalked into a high Gothic library, panelled with carved English oak,\nand probably transported complete from some ruin overseas.\n\nA stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles, was\nsitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with\nunsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he\nwheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot.\n\n“What do you think?” he demanded impetuously.\n\n“About what?”\n\nHe waved his hand toward the bookshelves.\n\n“About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I\nascertained. They’re real.”\n\n“The books?”\n\nHe nodded.\n\n“Absolutely real—have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice\ndurable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real.  Pages\nand—Here! Lemme show you.”\n\nTaking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and\nreturned with Volume One of the Stoddard Lectures.\n\n“See!” he cried triumphantly. “It’s a bona-fide piece of printed\nmatter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a\ntriumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop,\ntoo—didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”\n\nHe snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf,\nmuttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable\nto collapse.\n\n“Who brought you?” he demanded. “Or did you just come? I was brought.\nMost people were brought.”\n\nJordan looked at him alertly, cheerfully, without answering.\n\n“I was brought by a woman named Roosevelt,” he continued. “Mrs. Claud\nRoosevelt. Do you know her? I met her somewhere last night. I’ve been\ndrunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit\nin a library.”\n\n“Has it?”\n\n“A little bit, I think. I can’t tell yet. I’ve only been here an hour.\nDid I tell you about the books? They’re real. They’re—”\n\n“You told us.”\n\nWe shook hands with him gravely and went back outdoors.\n\nThere was dancing now on the canvas in the garden; old men pushing\nyoung girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior couples\nholding each other tortuously, fashionably, and keeping in the\ncorners—and a great number of single girls dancing individually or\nrelieving the orchestra for a moment of the burden of the banjo or the\ntraps. By midnight the hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor had\nsung in Italian, and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz, and\nbetween the numbers people were doing “stunts” all over the garden,\nwhile happy, vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky. A\npair of stage twins, who turned out to be the girls in yellow, did a\nbaby act in costume, and champagne was served in glasses bigger than\nfinger-bowls. The moon had risen higher, and floating in the Sound was\na triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny\ndrip of the banjoes on the lawn.\n\nI was still with Jordan Baker. We were sitting at a table with a man\nof about my age and a rowdy little girl, who gave way upon the\nslightest provocation to uncontrollable laughter. I was enjoying\nmyself now. I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene\nhad changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and\nprofound.\n\nAt a lull in the entertainment the man looked at me and smiled.\n\n“Your face is familiar,” he said politely. “Weren’t you in the First\nDivision during the war?”\n\n“Why yes. I was in the Twenty-eighth Infantry.”\n\n“I was in the Sixteenth until June nineteen-eighteen. I knew I’d seen\nyou somewhere before.”\n\nWe talked for a moment about some wet, grey little villages in France.\nEvidently he lived in this vicinity, for he told me that he had just\nbought a hydroplane, and was going to try it out in the morning.\n\n“Want to go with me, old sport? Just near the shore along the Sound.”\n\n“What time?”\n\n“Any time that suits you best.”\n\nIt was on the tip of my tongue to ask his name when Jordan looked\naround and smiled.\n\n“Having a gay time now?” she inquired.\n\n“Much better.” I turned again to my new acquaintance. “This is an\nunusual party for me. I haven’t even seen the host. I live over\nthere—” I waved my hand at the invisible hedge in the distance, “and\nthis man Gatsby sent over his chauffeur with an invitation.”\n\nFor a moment he looked at me as if he failed to understand.\n\n“I’m Gatsby,” he said suddenly.\n\n“What!” I exclaimed. “Oh, I beg your pardon.”\n\n“I thought you knew, old sport. I’m afraid I’m not a very good host.”\n\nHe smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one\nof those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that\nyou may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to\nface—the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on\nyou with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you\njust so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you\nwould like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had\nprecisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to\nconvey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an\nelegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate\nformality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he\nintroduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his\nwords with care.\n\nAlmost at the moment when Mr. Gatsby identified himself a butler\nhurried toward him with the information that Chicago was calling him\non the wire. He excused himself with a small bow that included each of\nus in turn.\n\n“If you want anything just ask for it, old sport,” he urged me.\n“Excuse me. I will rejoin you later.”\n\nWhen he was gone I turned immediately to Jordan—constrained to assure\nher of my surprise. I had expected that Mr. Gatsby would be a florid\nand corpulent person in his middle years.\n\n“Who is he?” I demanded. “Do you know?”\n\n“He’s just a man named Gatsby.”\n\n“Where is he from, I mean? And what does he do?”\n\n“Now you’re started on the subject,” she answered with a wan smile.\n“Well, he told me once he was an Oxford man.”\n\nA dim background started to take shape behind him, but at her next\nremark it faded away.\n\n“However, I don’t believe it.”\n\n“Why not?”\n\n“I don’t know,” she insisted, “I just don’t think he went there.”\n\nSomething in her tone reminded me of the other girl’s “I think he\nkilled a man,” and had the effect of stimulating my curiosity. I would\nhave accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang from\nthe swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York. That\nwas comprehensible. But young men didn’t—at least in my provincial\ninexperience I believed they didn’t—drift coolly out of nowhere and\nbuy a palace on Long Island Sound.\n\n“Anyhow, he gives large parties,” said Jordan, changing the subject\nwith an urban distaste for the concrete. “And I like large parties.\nThey’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”\n\nThere was the boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the orchestra\nleader rang out suddenly above the echolalia of the garden.\n\n“Ladies and gentlemen,” he cried. “At the request of Mr. Gatsby we are\ngoing to play for you Mr. Vladmir Tostoff’s latest work, which\nattracted so much attention at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the\npapers you know there was a big sensation.” He smiled with jovial\ncondescension, and added: “Some sensation!” Whereupon everybody\nlaughed.\n\n“The piece is known,” he concluded lustily, “as ‘Vladmir Tostoff’s\nJazz History of the World!’ ”\n\nThe nature of Mr. Tostoff’s composition eluded me, because just as it\nbegan my eyes fell on Gatsby, standing alone on the marble steps and\nlooking from one group to another with approving eyes. His tanned skin\nwas drawn attractively tight on his face and his short hair looked as\nthough it were trimmed every day. I could see nothing sinister about\nhim. I wondered if the fact that he was not drinking helped to set him\noff from his guests, for it seemed to me that he grew more correct as\nthe fraternal hilarity increased. When the “Jazz History of the World”\nwas over, girls were putting their heads on men’s shoulders in a\npuppyish, convivial way, girls were swooning backward playfully into\nmen’s arms, even into groups, knowing that someone would arrest their\nfalls—but no one swooned backward on Gatsby, and no French bob touched\nGatsby’s shoulder, and no singing quartets were formed with Gatsby’s\nhead for one link.\n\n“I beg your pardon.”\n\nGatsby’s butler was suddenly standing beside us.\n\n“Miss Baker?” he inquired. “I beg your pardon, but Mr. Gatsby would\nlike to speak to you alone.”\n\n“With me?” she exclaimed in surprise.\n\n“Yes, madame.”\n\nShe got up slowly, raising her eyebrows at me in astonishment, and\nfollowed the butler toward the house. I noticed that she wore her\nevening-dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes—there was a\njauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk\nupon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings.\n\nI was alone and it was almost two. For some time confused and\nintriguing sounds had issued from a long, many-windowed room which\noverhung the terrace. Eluding Jordan’s undergraduate, who was now\nengaged in an obstetrical conversation with two chorus girls, and who\nimplored me to join him, I went inside.\n\nThe large room was full of people. One of the girls in yellow was\nplaying the piano, and beside her stood a tall, red-haired young lady\nfrom a famous chorus, engaged in song. She had drunk a quantity of\nchampagne, and during the course of her song she had decided, ineptly,\nthat everything was very, very sad—she was not only singing, she was\nweeping too. Whenever there was a pause in the song she filled it with\ngasping, broken sobs, and then took up the lyric again in a quavering\nsoprano. The tears coursed down her cheeks—not freely, however, for\nwhen they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they\nassumed an inky colour, and pursued the rest of their way in slow\nblack rivulets. A humorous suggestion was made that she sing the notes\non her face, whereupon she threw up her hands, sank into a chair, and\nwent off into a deep vinous sleep.\n\n“She had a fight with a man who says he’s her husband,” explained a\ngirl at my elbow.\n\nI looked around. Most of the remaining women were now having fights\nwith men said to be their husbands. Even Jordan’s party, the quartet\nfrom East Egg, were rent asunder by dissension. One of the men was\ntalking with curious intensity to a young actress, and his wife, after\nattempting to laugh at the situation in a dignified and indifferent\nway, broke down entirely and resorted to flank attacks—at intervals\nshe appeared suddenly at his side like an angry diamond, and hissed:\n“You promised!” into his ear.\n\nThe reluctance to go home was not confined to wayward men. The hall\nwas at present occupied by two deplorably sober men and their highly\nindignant wives. The wives were sympathizing with each other in\nslightly raised voices.\n\n“Whenever he sees I’m having a good time he wants to go home.”\n\n“Never heard anything so selfish in my life.”\n\n“We’re always the first ones to leave.”\n\n“So are we.”\n\n“Well, we’re almost the last tonight,” said one of the men sheepishly.\n“The orchestra left half an hour ago.”\n\nIn spite of the wives’ agreement that such malevolence was beyond\ncredibility, the dispute ended in a short struggle, and both wives\nwere lifted, kicking, into the night.\n\nAs I waited for my hat in the hall the door of the library opened and\nJordan Baker and Gatsby came out together. He was saying some last\nword to her, but the eagerness in his manner tightened abruptly into\nformality as several people approached him to say goodbye.\n\nJordan’s party were calling impatiently to her from the porch, but she\nlingered for a moment to shake hands.\n\n“I’ve just heard the most amazing thing,” she whispered. “How long\nwere we in there?”\n\n“Why, about an hour.”\n\n“It was … simply amazing,” she repeated abstractedly. “But I swore I\nwouldn’t tell it and here I am tantalizing you.” She yawned gracefully\nin my face. “Please come and see me … Phone book … Under the name of\nMrs. Sigourney Howard … My aunt …” She was hurrying off as she\ntalked—her brown hand waved a jaunty salute as she melted into her\nparty at the door.\n\nRather ashamed that on my first appearance I had stayed so late, I\njoined the last of Gatsby’s guests, who were clustered around him. I\nwanted to explain that I’d hunted for him early in the evening and to\napologize for not having known him in the garden.\n\n“Don’t mention it,” he enjoined me eagerly. “Don’t give it another\nthought, old sport.” The familiar expression held no more familiarity\nthan the hand which reassuringly brushed my shoulder. “And don’t\nforget we’re going up in the hydroplane tomorrow morning, at nine\no’clock.”\n\nThen the butler, behind his shoulder:\n\n“Philadelphia wants you on the phone, sir.”\n\n“All right, in a minute. Tell them I’ll be right there … Good night.”\n\n“Good night.”\n\n“Good night.” He smiled—and suddenly there seemed to be a pleasant\nsignificance in having been among the last to go, as if he had desired\nit all the time. “Good night, old sport … Good night.”\n\nBut as I walked down the steps I saw that the evening was not quite\nover. Fifty feet from the door a dozen headlights illuminated a\nbizarre and tumultuous scene. In the ditch beside the road, right side\nup, but violently shorn of one wheel, rested a new coupé which had\nleft Gatsby’s drive not two minutes before. The sharp jut of a wall\naccounted for the detachment of the wheel, which was now getting\nconsiderable attention from half a dozen curious chauffeurs. However,\nas they had left their cars blocking the road, a harsh, discordant din\nfrom those in the rear had been audible for some time, and added to\nthe already violent confusion of the scene.\n\nA man in a long duster had dismounted from the wreck and now stood in\nthe middle of the road, looking from the car to the tyre and from the\ntyre to the observers in a pleasant, puzzled way.\n\n“See!” he explained. “It went in the ditch.”\n\nThe fact was infinitely astonishing to him, and I recognized first the\nunusual quality of wonder, and then the man—it was the late patron of\nGatsby’s library.\n\n“How’d it happen?”\n\nHe shrugged his shoulders.\n\n“I know nothing whatever about mechanics,” he said decisively.\n\n“But how did it happen? Did you run into the wall?”\n\n“Don’t ask me,” said Owl Eyes, washing his hands of the whole\nmatter. “I know very little about driving—next to nothing. It\nhappened, and that’s all I know.”\n\n“Well, if you’re a poor driver you oughtn’t to try driving at night.”\n\n“But I wasn’t even trying,” he explained indignantly, “I wasn’t even\ntrying.”\n\nAn awed hush fell upon the bystanders.\n\n“Do you want to commit suicide?”\n\n“You’re lucky it was just a wheel! A bad driver and not even trying!”\n\n“You don’t understand,” explained the criminal. “I wasn’t driving.\nThere’s another man in the car.”\n\nThe shock that followed this declaration found voice in a sustained\n“Ah-h-h!” as the door of the coupé swung slowly open. The crowd—it was\nnow a crowd—stepped back involuntarily, and when the door had opened\nwide there was a ghostly pause. Then, very gradually, part by part, a\npale, dangling individual stepped out of the wreck, pawing tentatively\nat the ground with a large uncertain dancing shoe.\n\nBlinded by the glare of the headlights and confused by the incessant\ngroaning of the horns, the apparition stood swaying for a moment\nbefore he perceived the man in the duster.\n\n“Wha’s matter?” he inquired calmly. “Did we run outa gas?”\n\n“Look!”\n\nHalf a dozen fingers pointed at the amputated wheel—he stared at it\nfor a moment, and then looked upward as though he suspected that it\nhad dropped from the sky.\n\n“It came off,” someone explained.\n\nHe nodded.\n\n“At first I din’ notice we’d stopped.”\n\nA pause. Then, taking a long breath and straightening his shoulders,\nhe remarked in a determined voice:\n\n“Wonder’ff tell me where there’s a gas’line station?”\n\nAt least a dozen men, some of them a little better off than he was,\nexplained to him that wheel and car were no longer joined by any\nphysical bond.\n\n“Back out,” he suggested after a moment. “Put her in reverse.”\n\n“But the wheel’s off!”\n\nHe hesitated.\n\n“No harm in trying,” he said.\n\nThe caterwauling horns had reached a crescendo and I turned away and\ncut across the lawn toward home. I glanced back once. A wafer of a\nmoon was shining over Gatsby’s house, making the night fine as before,\nand surviving the laughter and the sound of his still glowing garden.\nA sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great\ndoors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host, who\nstood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nReading over what I have written so far, I see I have given the\nimpression that the events of three nights several weeks apart were\nall that absorbed me. On the contrary, they were merely casual events\nin a crowded summer, and, until much later, they absorbed me\ninfinitely less than my personal affairs.\n\nMost of the time I worked. In the early morning the sun threw my\nshadow westward as I hurried down the white chasms of lower New York\nto the Probity Trust. I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen\nby their first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded\nrestaurants on little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee. I\neven had a short affair with a girl who lived in Jersey City and\nworked in the accounting department, but her brother began throwing\nmean looks in my direction, so when she went on her vacation in July I\nlet it blow quietly away.\n\nI took dinner usually at the Yale Club—for some reason it was the\ngloomiest event of my day—and then I went upstairs to the library and\nstudied investments and securities for a conscientious hour. There\nwere generally a few rioters around, but they never came into the\nlibrary, so it was a good place to work. After that, if the night was\nmellow, I strolled down Madison Avenue past the old Murray Hill Hotel,\nand over 33rd Street to the Pennsylvania Station.\n\nI began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night,\nand the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and\nmachines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue\nand pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few\nminutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever\nknow or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their\napartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and\nsmiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm\ndarkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting\nloneliness sometimes, and felt it in others—poor young clerks who\nloitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary\nrestaurant dinner—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant\nmoments of night and life.\n\nAgain at eight o’clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were lined\nfive deep with throbbing taxicabs, bound for the theatre district, I\nfelt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they\nwaited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes,\nand lighted cigarettes made unintelligible circles inside. Imagining\nthat I, too, was hurrying towards gaiety and sharing their intimate\nexcitement, I wished them well.\n\nFor a while I lost sight of Jordan Baker, and then in midsummer I\nfound her again. At first I was flattered to go places with her,\nbecause she was a golf champion, and everyone knew her name. Then it\nwas something more. I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of\ntender curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the world\nconcealed something—most affectations conceal something eventually,\neven though they don’t in the beginning—and one day I found what it\nwas. When we were on a house-party together up in Warwick, she left a\nborrowed car out in the rain with the top down, and then lied about\nit—and suddenly I remembered the story about her that had eluded me\nthat night at Daisy’s. At her first big golf tournament there was a\nrow that nearly reached the newspapers—a suggestion that she had moved\nher ball from a bad lie in the semifinal round. The thing approached\nthe proportions of a scandal—then died away. A caddy retracted his\nstatement, and the only other witness admitted that he might have been\nmistaken. The incident and the name had remained together in my mind.\n\nJordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw\nthat this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence\nfrom a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest.\nShe wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this\nunwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she\nwas very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to\nthe world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body.\n\nIt made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you\nnever blame deeply—I was casually sorry, and then I forgot. It was on\nthat same house-party that we had a curious conversation about driving\na car. It started because she passed so close to some workmen that our\nfender flicked a button on one man’s coat.\n\n“You’re a rotten driver,” I protested. “Either you ought to be more\ncareful, or you oughtn’t to drive at all.”\n\n“I am careful.”\n\n“No, you’re not.”\n\n“Well, other people are,” she said lightly.\n\n“What’s that got to do with it?”\n\n“They’ll keep out of my way,” she insisted. “It takes two to make an\naccident.”\n\n“Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.”\n\n“I hope I never will,” she answered. “I hate careless people. That’s\nwhy I like you.”\n\nHer grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had\ndeliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved\nher. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as\nbrakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself\ndefinitely out of that tangle back home. I’d been writing letters once\na week and signing them: “Love, Nick,” and all I could think of was\nhow, when that certain girl played tennis, a faint moustache of\nperspiration appeared on her upper lip. Nevertheless there was a vague\nunderstanding that had to be tactfully broken off before I was free.\n\nEveryone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and\nthis is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever\nknown.\n\n\n                                  IV\n\nOn Sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages alongshore,\nthe world and its mistress returned to Gatsby’s house and twinkled\nhilariously on his lawn.\n\n“He’s a bootlegger,” said the young ladies, moving somewhere between\nhis cocktails and his flowers. “One time he killed a man who had found\nout that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the\ndevil. Reach me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that there\ncrystal glass.”\n\nOnce I wrote down on the empty spaces of a timetable the names of\nthose who came to Gatsby’s house that summer. It is an old timetable\nnow, disintegrating at its folds, and headed “This schedule in effect\nJuly 5th, 1922.” But I can still read the grey names, and they will\ngive you a better impression than my generalities of those who\naccepted Gatsby’s hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of\nknowing nothing whatever about him.\n\nFrom East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches, and a\nman named Bunsen, whom I knew at Yale, and Doctor Webster Civet, who\nwas drowned last summer up in Maine. And the Hornbeams and the Willie\nVoltaires, and a whole clan named Blackbuck, who always gathered in a\ncorner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosoever came\nnear. And the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and\nMr. Chrystie’s wife), and Edgar Beaver, whose hair, they say, turned\ncotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all.\n\nClarence Endive was from East Egg, as I remember. He came only once,\nin white knickerbockers, and had a fight with a bum named Etty in the\ngarden. From farther out on the Island came the Cheadles and the O.\nR. P. Schraeders, and the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of Georgia, and the\nFishguards and the Ripley Snells. Snell was there three days before he\nwent to the penitentiary, so drunk out on the gravel drive that\nMrs. Ulysses Swett’s automobile ran over his right hand. The Dancies\ncame, too, and S. B. Whitebait, who was well over sixty, and Maurice\nA. Flink, and the Hammerheads, and Beluga the tobacco importer, and\nBeluga’s girls.\n\nFrom West Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys and Cecil Roebuck and\nCecil Schoen and Gulick the State senator and Newton Orchid, who\ncontrolled Films Par Excellence, and Eckhaust and Clyde Cohen and Don\nS. Schwartz (the son) and Arthur McCarty, all connected with the\nmovies in one way or another. And the Catlips and the Bembergs and G.\nEarl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon who afterward strangled his\nwife. Da Fontano the promoter came there, and Ed Legros and James B.\n(“Rot-Gut”) Ferret and the De Jongs and Ernest Lilly—they came to\ngamble, and when Ferret wandered into the garden it meant he was\ncleaned out and Associated Traction would have to fluctuate profitably\nnext day.\n\nA man named Klipspringer was there so often that he became known as\n“the boarder”—I doubt if he had any other home. Of theatrical people\nthere were Gus Waize and Horace O’Donavan and Lester Myer and George\nDuckweed and Francis Bull. Also from New York were the Chromes and the\nBackhyssons and the Dennickers and Russel Betty and the Corrigans and\nthe Kellehers and the Dewars and the Scullys and S. W. Belcher and the\nSmirkes and the young Quinns, divorced now, and Henry L. Palmetto, who\nkilled himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square.\n\nBenny McClenahan arrived always with four girls. They were never quite\nthe same ones in physical person, but they were so identical one with\nanother that it inevitably seemed they had been there before. I have\nforgotten their names—Jaqueline, I think, or else Consuela, or Gloria\nor Judy or June, and their last names were either the melodious names\nof flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American\ncapitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves\nto be.\n\nIn addition to all these I can remember that Faustina O’Brien came\nthere at least once and the Baedeker girls and young Brewer, who had\nhis nose shot off in the war, and Mr. Albrucksburger and Miss Haag,\nhis fiancée, and Ardita Fitz-Peters and Mr. P. Jewett, once head of\nthe American Legion, and Miss Claudia Hip, with a man reputed to be\nher chauffeur, and a prince of something, whom we called Duke, and\nwhose name, if I ever knew it, I have forgotten.\n\nAll these people came to Gatsby’s house in the summer.\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nAt nine o’clock, one morning late in July, Gatsby’s gorgeous car\nlurched up the rocky drive to my door and gave out a burst of melody\nfrom its three-noted horn.\n\nIt was the first time he had called on me, though I had gone to two of\nhis parties, mounted in his hydroplane, and, at his urgent invitation,\nmade frequent use of his beach.\n\n“Good morning, old sport. You’re having lunch with me today and I\nthought we’d ride up together.”\n\nHe was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that\nresourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American—that comes,\nI suppose, with the absence of lifting work in youth and, even more,\nwith the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games. This quality\nwas continually breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape\nof restlessness. He was never quite still; there was always a tapping\nfoot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand.\n\nHe saw me looking with admiration at his car.\n\n“It’s pretty, isn’t it, old sport?” He jumped off to give me a better\nview. “Haven’t you ever seen it before?”\n\nI’d seen it. Everybody had seen it. It was a rich cream colour, bright\nwith nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with\ntriumphant hatboxes and supper-boxes and toolboxes, and terraced with\na labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down\nbehind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory,\nwe started to town.\n\nI had talked with him perhaps half a dozen times in the past month and\nfound, to my disappointment, that he had little to say. So my first\nimpression, that he was a person of some undefined consequence, had\ngradually faded and he had become simply the proprietor of an\nelaborate roadhouse next door.\n\nAnd then came that disconcerting ride. We hadn’t reached West Egg\nvillage before Gatsby began leaving his elegant sentences unfinished\nand slapping himself indecisively on the knee of his caramel-coloured\nsuit.\n\n“Look here, old sport,” he broke out surprisingly, “what’s your\nopinion of me, anyhow?”\n\nA little overwhelmed, I began the generalized evasions which that\nquestion deserves.\n\n“Well, I’m going to tell you something about my life,” he interrupted.\n“I don’t want you to get a wrong idea of me from all these stories you\nhear.”\n\nSo he was aware of the bizarre accusations that flavoured conversation\nin his halls.\n\n“I’ll tell you God’s truth.” His right hand suddenly ordered divine\nretribution to stand by. “I am the son of some wealthy people in the\nMiddle West—all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at\nOxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many\nyears. It is a family tradition.”\n\nHe looked at me sideways—and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he\nwas lying. He hurried the phrase “educated at Oxford,” or swallowed\nit, or choked on it, as though it had bothered him before. And with\nthis doubt, his whole statement fell to pieces, and I wondered if\nthere wasn’t something a little sinister about him, after all.\n\n“What part of the Middle West?” I inquired casually.\n\n“San Francisco.”\n\n“I see.”\n\n“My family all died and I came into a good deal of money.”\n\nHis voice was solemn, as if the memory of that sudden extinction of a\nclan still haunted him. For a moment I suspected that he was pulling\nmy leg, but a glance at him convinced me otherwise.\n\n“After that I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of\nEurope—Paris, Venice, Rome—collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting\nbig game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to\nforget something very sad that had happened to me long ago.”\n\nWith an effort I managed to restrain my incredulous laughter. The very\nphrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that\nof a turbaned “character” leaking sawdust at every pore as he pursued\na tiger through the Bois de Boulogne.\n\n“Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very\nhard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life. I accepted a\ncommission as first lieutenant when it began. In the Argonne Forest I\ntook the remains of my machine-gun battalion so far forward that there\nwas a half mile gap on either side of us where the infantry couldn’t\nadvance. We stayed there two days and two nights, a hundred and thirty\nmen with sixteen Lewis guns, and when the infantry came up at last\nthey found the insignia of three German divisions among the piles of\ndead. I was promoted to be a major, and every Allied government gave\nme a decoration—even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the\nAdriatic Sea!”\n\nLittle Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them—with his\nsmile. The smile comprehended Montenegro’s troubled history and\nsympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. It\nappreciated fully the chain of national circumstances which had\nelicited this tribute from Montenegro’s warm little heart. My\nincredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming\nhastily through a dozen magazines.\n\nHe reached in his pocket, and a piece of metal, slung on a ribbon,\nfell into my palm.\n\n“That’s the one from Montenegro.”\n\nTo my astonishment, the thing had an authentic look. “Orderi di\nDanilo,” ran the circular legend, “Montenegro, Nicolas Rex.”\n\n“Turn it.”\n\n“Major Jay Gatsby,” I read, “For Valour Extraordinary.”\n\n“Here’s another thing I always carry. A souvenir of Oxford days. It\nwas taken in Trinity Quad—the man on my left is now the Earl of\nDoncaster.”\n\nIt was a photograph of half a dozen young men in blazers loafing in an\narchway through which were visible a host of spires. There was Gatsby,\nlooking a little, not much, younger—with a cricket bat in his hand.\n\nThen it was all true. I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace\non the Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with\ntheir crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart.\n\n“I’m going to make a big request of you today,” he said, pocketing his\nsouvenirs with satisfaction, “so I thought you ought to know something\nabout me. I didn’t want you to think I was just some nobody. You see,\nI usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there\ntrying to forget the sad things that happened to me.” He hesitated.\n“You’ll hear about it this afternoon.”\n\n“At lunch?”\n\n“No, this afternoon. I happened to find out that you’re taking Miss\nBaker to tea.”\n\n“Do you mean you’re in love with Miss Baker?”\n\n“No, old sport, I’m not. But Miss Baker has kindly consented to speak\nto you about this matter.”\n\nI hadn’t the faintest idea what “this matter” was, but I was more\nannoyed than interested. I hadn’t asked Jordan to tea in order to\ndiscuss Mr. Jay Gatsby. I was sure the request would be something\nutterly fantastic, and for a moment I was sorry I’d ever set foot upon\nhis overpopulated lawn.\n\nHe wouldn’t say another word. His correctness grew on him as we neared\nthe city. We passed Port Roosevelt, where there was a glimpse of\nred-belted oceangoing ships, and sped along a cobbled slum lined with\nthe dark, undeserted saloons of the faded-gilt nineteen-hundreds.\nThen the valley of ashes opened out on both sides of us, and I had a\nglimpse of Mrs. Wilson straining at the garage pump with panting\nvitality as we went by.\n\nWith fenders spread like wings we scattered light through half\nAstoria—only half, for as we twisted among the pillars of the elevated\nI heard the familiar “jug-jug-spat!” of a motorcycle, and a frantic\npoliceman rode alongside.\n\n“All right, old sport,” called Gatsby. We slowed down. Taking a white\ncard from his wallet, he waved it before the man’s eyes.\n\n“Right you are,” agreed the policeman, tipping his cap. “Know you next\ntime, Mr. Gatsby. Excuse me!”\n\n“What was that?” I inquired. “The picture of Oxford?”\n\n“I was able to do the commissioner a favour once, and he sends me a\nChristmas card every year.”\n\nOver the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a\nconstant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across\nthe river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of\nnonolfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always\nthe city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the\nmystery and the beauty in the world.\n\nA dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two\ncarriages with drawn blinds, and by more cheerful carriages for\nfriends. The friends looked out at us with the tragic eyes and short\nupper lips of southeastern Europe, and I was glad that the sight of\nGatsby’s splendid car was included in their sombre holiday. As we\ncrossed Blackwell’s Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white\nchauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl. I\nlaughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in\nhaughty rivalry.\n\n“Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge,” I thought;\n“anything at all …”\n\nEven Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nRoaring noon. In a well-fanned Forty-second Street cellar I met Gatsby\nfor lunch. Blinking away the brightness of the street outside, my eyes\npicked him out obscurely in the anteroom, talking to another man.\n\n“Mr. Carraway, this is my friend Mr. Wolfshiem.”\n\nA small, flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two\nfine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril. After a\nmoment I discovered his tiny eyes in the half-darkness.\n\n“—So I took one look at him,” said Mr. Wolfshiem, shaking my hand\nearnestly, “and what do you think I did?”\n\n“What?” I inquired politely.\n\nBut evidently he was not addressing me, for he dropped my hand and\ncovered Gatsby with his expressive nose.\n\n“I handed the money to Katspaugh and I said: ‘All right, Katspaugh,\ndon’t pay him a penny till he shuts his mouth.’ He shut it then and\nthere.”\n\nGatsby took an arm of each of us and moved forward into the\nrestaurant, whereupon Mr. Wolfshiem swallowed a new sentence he was\nstarting and lapsed into a somnambulatory abstraction.\n\n“Highballs?” asked the head waiter.\n\n“This is a nice restaurant here,” said Mr. Wolfshiem, looking at the\npresbyterian nymphs on the ceiling. “But I like across the street\nbetter!”\n\n“Yes, highballs,” agreed Gatsby, and then to Mr. Wolfshiem: “It’s too\nhot over there.”\n\n“Hot and small—yes,” said Mr. Wolfshiem, “but full of memories.”\n\n“What place is that?” I asked.\n\n“The old Metropole.”\n\n“The old Metropole,” brooded Mr. Wolfshiem gloomily. “Filled with\nfaces dead and gone. Filled with friends gone now forever. I can’t\nforget so long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there. It\nwas six of us at the table, and Rosy had eat and drunk a lot all\nevening. When it was almost morning the waiter came up to him with a\nfunny look and says somebody wants to speak to him outside. ‘All\nright,’ says Rosy, and begins to get up, and I pulled him down in his\nchair.\n\n“ ‘Let the bastards come in here if they want you, Rosy, but don’t\nyou, so help me, move outside this room.’\n\n“It was four o’clock in the morning then, and if we’d of raised the\nblinds we’d of seen daylight.”\n\n“Did he go?” I asked innocently.\n\n“Sure he went.” Mr. Wolfshiem’s nose flashed at me indignantly. “He\nturned around in the door and says: ‘Don’t let that waiter take away\nmy coffee!’ Then he went out on the sidewalk, and they shot him three\ntimes in his full belly and drove away.”\n\n“Four of them were electrocuted,” I said, remembering.\n\n“Five, with Becker.” His nostrils turned to me in an interested way.\n“I understand you’re looking for a business gonnegtion.”\n\nThe juxtaposition of these two remarks was startling. Gatsby answered\nfor me:\n\n“Oh, no,” he exclaimed, “this isn’t the man.”\n\n“No?” Mr. Wolfshiem seemed disappointed.\n\n“This is just a friend. I told you we’d talk about that some other\ntime.”\n\n“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Wolfshiem, “I had a wrong man.”\n\nA succulent hash arrived, and Mr. Wolfshiem, forgetting the more\nsentimental atmosphere of the old Metropole, began to eat with\nferocious delicacy. His eyes, meanwhile, roved very slowly all around\nthe room—he completed the arc by turning to inspect the people\ndirectly behind. I think that, except for my presence, he would have\ntaken one short glance beneath our own table.\n\n“Look here, old sport,” said Gatsby, leaning toward me, “I’m afraid I\nmade you a little angry this morning in the car.”\n\nThere was the smile again, but this time I held out against it.\n\n“I don’t like mysteries,” I answered, “and I don’t understand why you\nwon’t come out frankly and tell me what you want. Why has it all got\nto come through Miss Baker?”\n\n“Oh, it’s nothing underhand,” he assured me. “Miss Baker’s a great\nsportswoman, you know, and she’d never do anything that wasn’t all\nright.”\n\nSuddenly he looked at his watch, jumped up, and hurried from the room,\nleaving me with Mr. Wolfshiem at the table.\n\n“He has to telephone,” said Mr. Wolfshiem, following him with his\neyes. “Fine fellow, isn’t he? Handsome to look at and a perfect\ngentleman.”\n\n“Yes.”\n\n“He’s an Oggsford man.”\n\n“Oh!”\n\n“He went to Oggsford College in England. You know Oggsford College?”\n\n“I’ve heard of it.”\n\n“It’s one of the most famous colleges in the world.”\n\n“Have you known Gatsby for a long time?” I inquired.\n\n“Several years,” he answered in a gratified way. “I made the pleasure\nof his acquaintance just after the war. But I knew I had discovered a\nman of fine breeding after I talked with him an hour. I said to\nmyself: ‘There’s the kind of man you’d like to take home and introduce\nto your mother and sister.’ ” He paused. “I see you’re looking at my\ncuff buttons.”\n\nI hadn’t been looking at them, but I did now. They were composed of\noddly familiar pieces of ivory.\n\n“Finest specimens of human molars,” he informed me.\n\n“Well!” I inspected them. “That’s a very interesting idea.”\n\n“Yeah.” He flipped his sleeves up under his coat. “Yeah, Gatsby’s very\ncareful about women. He would never so much as look at a friend’s\nwife.”\n\nWhen the subject of this instinctive trust returned to the table and\nsat down Mr. Wolfshiem drank his coffee with a jerk and got to his\nfeet.\n\n“I have enjoyed my lunch,” he said, “and I’m going to run off from you\ntwo young men before I outstay my welcome.”\n\n“Don’t hurry Meyer,” said Gatsby, without enthusiasm. Mr. Wolfshiem\nraised his hand in a sort of benediction.\n\n“You’re very polite, but I belong to another generation,” he announced\nsolemnly. “You sit here and discuss your sports and your young ladies\nand your—” He supplied an imaginary noun with another wave of his\nhand. “As for me, I am fifty years old, and I won’t impose myself on\nyou any longer.”\n\nAs he shook hands and turned away his tragic nose was trembling. I\nwondered if I had said anything to offend him.\n\n“He becomes very sentimental sometimes,” explained Gatsby. “This is\none of his sentimental days. He’s quite a character around New York—a\ndenizen of Broadway.”\n\n“Who is he, anyhow, an actor?”\n\n“No.”\n\n“A dentist?”\n\n“Meyer Wolfshiem? No, he’s a gambler.” Gatsby hesitated, then added,\ncoolly: “He’s the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919.”\n\n“Fixed the World’s Series?” I repeated.\n\nThe idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World’s\nSeries had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I\nwould have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of\nsome inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could\nstart to play with the faith of fifty million people—with the\nsingle-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.\n\n“How did he happen to do that?” I asked after a minute.\n\n“He just saw the opportunity.”\n\n“Why isn’t he in jail?”\n\n“They can’t get him, old sport. He’s a smart man.”\n\nI insisted on paying the check. As the waiter brought my change I\ncaught sight of Tom Buchanan across the crowded room.\n\n“Come along with me for a minute,” I said; “I’ve got to say hello to\nsomeone.”\n\nWhen he saw us Tom jumped up and took half a dozen steps in our\ndirection.\n\n“Where’ve you been?” he demanded eagerly. “Daisy’s furious because you\nhaven’t called up.”\n\n“This is Mr. Gatsby, Mr. Buchanan.”\n\nThey shook hands briefly, and a strained, unfamiliar look of\nembarrassment came over Gatsby’s face.\n\n“How’ve you been, anyhow?” demanded Tom of me. “How’d you happen to\ncome up this far to eat?”\n\n“I’ve been having lunch with Mr. Gatsby.”\n\nI turned toward Mr. Gatsby, but he was no longer there.\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nOne October day in nineteen-seventeen—\n\n(said Jordan Baker that afternoon, sitting up very straight on a\nstraight chair in the tea-garden at the Plaza Hotel)\n\n—I was walking along from one place to another, half on the sidewalks\nand half on the lawns. I was happier on the lawns because I had on\nshoes from England with rubber knobs on the soles that bit into the\nsoft ground. I had on a new plaid skirt also that blew a little in the\nwind, and whenever this happened the red, white, and blue banners in\nfront of all the houses stretched out stiff and said tut-tut-tut-tut,\nin a disapproving way.\n\nThe largest of the banners and the largest of the lawns belonged to\nDaisy Fay’s house. She was just eighteen, two years older than me, and\nby far the most popular of all the young girls in Louisville. She\ndressed in white, and had a little white roadster, and all day long\nthe telephone rang in her house and excited young officers from Camp\nTaylor demanded the privilege of monopolizing her that\nnight. “Anyways, for an hour!”\n\nWhen I came opposite her house that morning her white roadster was\nbeside the kerb, and she was sitting in it with a lieutenant I had\nnever seen before. They were so engrossed in each other that she\ndidn’t see me until I was five feet away.\n\n“Hello, Jordan,” she called unexpectedly. “Please come here.”\n\nI was flattered that she wanted to speak to me, because of all the\nolder girls I admired her most. She asked me if I was going to the Red\nCross to make bandages. I was. Well, then, would I tell them that she\ncouldn’t come that day? The officer looked at Daisy while she was\nspeaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at\nsometime, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the\nincident ever since. His name was Jay Gatsby, and I didn’t lay eyes on\nhim again for over four years—even after I’d met him on Long Island I\ndidn’t realize it was the same man.\n\nThat was nineteen-seventeen. By the next year I had a few beaux\nmyself, and I began to play in tournaments, so I didn’t see Daisy very\noften. She went with a slightly older crowd—when she went with anyone\nat all. Wild rumours were circulating about her—how her mother had\nfound her packing her bag one winter night to go to New York and say\ngoodbye to a soldier who was going overseas. She was effectually\nprevented, but she wasn’t on speaking terms with her family for\nseveral weeks. After that she didn’t play around with the soldiers any\nmore, but only with a few flat-footed, shortsighted young men in town,\nwho couldn’t get into the army at all.\n\nBy the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever. She had a début\nafter the armistice, and in February she was presumably engaged to a\nman from New Orleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago,\nwith more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before. He\ncame down with a hundred people in four private cars, and hired a\nwhole floor of the Muhlbach Hotel, and the day before the wedding he\ngave her a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand\ndollars.\n\nI was a bridesmaid. I came into her room half an hour before the\nbridal dinner, and found her lying on her bed as lovely as the June\nnight in her flowered dress—and as drunk as a monkey. She had a bottle\nof Sauterne in one hand and a letter in the other.\n\n“ ’Gratulate me,” she muttered. “Never had a drink before, but oh how\nI do enjoy it.”\n\n“What’s the matter, Daisy?”\n\nI was scared, I can tell you; I’d never seen a girl like that before.\n\n“Here, dearies.” She groped around in a wastebasket she had with her\non the bed and pulled out the string of pearls. “Take ’em downstairs\nand give ’em back to whoever they belong to. Tell ’em all Daisy’s\nchange’ her mine. Say: ‘Daisy’s change’ her mine!’ ”\n\nShe began to cry—she cried and cried. I rushed out and found her\nmother’s maid, and we locked the door and got her into a cold bath.\nShe wouldn’t let go of the letter. She took it into the tub with her\nand squeezed it up in a wet ball, and only let me leave it in the\nsoap-dish when she saw that it was coming to pieces like snow.\n\nBut she didn’t say another word. We gave her spirits of ammonia and\nput ice on her forehead and hooked her back into her dress, and half\nan hour later, when we walked out of the room, the pearls were around\nher neck and the incident was over. Next day at five o’clock she\nmarried Tom Buchanan without so much as a shiver, and started off on a\nthree months’ trip to the South Seas.\n\nI saw them in Santa Barbara when they came back, and I thought I’d\nnever seen a girl so mad about her husband. If he left the room for a\nminute she’d look around uneasily, and say: “Where’s Tom gone?” and\nwear the most abstracted expression until she saw him coming in the\ndoor. She used to sit on the sand with his head in her lap by the\nhour, rubbing her fingers over his eyes and looking at him with\nunfathomable delight. It was touching to see them together—it made you\nlaugh in a hushed, fascinated way. That was in August. A week after I\nleft Santa Barbara Tom ran into a wagon on the Ventura road one night,\nand ripped a front wheel off his car. The girl who was with him got\ninto the papers, too, because her arm was broken—she was one of the\nchambermaids in the Santa Barbara Hotel.\n\nThe next April Daisy had her little girl, and they went to France for\na year. I saw them one spring in Cannes, and later in Deauville, and\nthen they came back to Chicago to settle down. Daisy was popular in\nChicago, as you know. They moved with a fast crowd, all of them young\nand rich and wild, but she came out with an absolutely perfect\nreputation. Perhaps because she doesn’t drink. It’s a great advantage\nnot to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and,\nmoreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that\neverybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care. Perhaps Daisy\nnever went in for amour at all—and yet there’s something in that voice\nof hers …\n\nWell, about six weeks ago, she heard the name Gatsby for the first\ntime in years. It was when I asked you—do you remember?—if you knew\nGatsby in West Egg. After you had gone home she came into my room and\nwoke me up, and said: “What Gatsby?” and when I described him—I was\nhalf asleep—she said in the strangest voice that it must be the man\nshe used to know. It wasn’t until then that I connected this Gatsby\nwith the officer in her white car.\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nWhen Jordan Baker had finished telling all this we had left the Plaza\nfor half an hour and were driving in a victoria through Central Park.\nThe sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in\nthe West Fifties, and the clear voices of children, already gathered\nlike crickets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight:\n\n “I’m the Sheik of Araby. Your love belongs to me. At night when\n you’re asleep Into your tent I’ll creep—”\n\n“It was a strange coincidence,” I said.\n\n“But it wasn’t a coincidence at all.”\n\n“Why not?”\n\n“Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay.”\n\nThen it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that\nJune night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of\nhis purposeless splendour.\n\n“He wants to know,” continued Jordan, “if you’ll invite Daisy to your\nhouse some afternoon and then let him come over.”\n\nThe modesty of the demand shook me. He had waited five years and\nbought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths—so that\nhe could “come over” some afternoon to a stranger’s garden.\n\n“Did I have to know all this before he could ask such a little thing?”\n\n“He’s afraid, he’s waited so long. He thought you might be\noffended. You see, he’s regular tough underneath it all.”\n\nSomething worried me.\n\n“Why didn’t he ask you to arrange a meeting?”\n\n“He wants her to see his house,” she explained. “And your house is\nright next door.”\n\n“Oh!”\n\n“I think he half expected her to wander into one of his parties, some\nnight,” went on Jordan, “but she never did. Then he began asking\npeople casually if they knew her, and I was the first one he found. It\nwas that night he sent for me at his dance, and you should have heard\nthe elaborate way he worked up to it. Of course, I immediately\nsuggested a luncheon in New York—and I thought he’d go mad:\n\n“ ‘I don’t want to do anything out of the way!’ he kept saying. ‘I\nwant to see her right next door.’\n\n“When I said you were a particular friend of Tom’s, he started to\nabandon the whole idea. He doesn’t know very much about Tom, though he\nsays he’s read a Chicago paper for years just on the chance of\ncatching a glimpse of Daisy’s name.”\n\nIt was dark now, and as we dipped under a little bridge I put my arm\naround Jordan’s golden shoulder and drew her toward me and asked her\nto dinner. Suddenly I wasn’t thinking of Daisy and Gatsby any more,\nbut of this clean, hard, limited person, who dealt in universal\nscepticism, and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my\narm. A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady\nexcitement: “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and\nthe tired.”\n\n“And Daisy ought to have something in her life,” murmured Jordan to\nme.\n\n“Does she want to see Gatsby?”\n\n“She’s not to know about it. Gatsby doesn’t want her to know. You’re\njust supposed to invite her to tea.”\n\nWe passed a barrier of dark trees, and then the façade of Fifty-Ninth\nStreet, a block of delicate pale light, beamed down into the park.\nUnlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, I had no girl whose disembodied face\nfloated along the dark cornices and blinding signs, and so I drew up\nthe girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan, scornful mouth\nsmiled, and so I drew her up again closer, this time to my face.\n\n\n                                  V\n\nWhen I came home to West Egg that night I was afraid for a moment that\nmy house was on fire. Two o’clock and the whole corner of the\npeninsula was blazing with light, which fell unreal on the shrubbery\nand made thin elongating glints upon the roadside wires. Turning a\ncorner, I saw that it was Gatsby’s house, lit from tower to cellar.\n\nAt first I thought it was another party, a wild rout that had resolved\nitself into “hide-and-go-seek” or “sardines-in-the-box” with all the\nhouse thrown open to the game. But there wasn’t a sound. Only wind in\nthe trees, which blew the wires and made the lights go off and on\nagain as if the house had winked into the darkness. As my taxi groaned\naway I saw Gatsby walking toward me across his lawn.\n\n“Your place looks like the World’s Fair,” I said.\n\n“Does it?” He turned his eyes toward it absently. “I have been\nglancing into some of the rooms. Let’s go to Coney Island, old\nsport. In my car.”\n\n“It’s too late.”\n\n“Well, suppose we take a plunge in the swimming pool? I haven’t made\nuse of it all summer.”\n\n“I’ve got to go to bed.”\n\n“All right.”\n\nHe waited, looking at me with suppressed eagerness.\n\n“I talked with Miss Baker,” I said after a moment. “I’m going to call\nup Daisy tomorrow and invite her over here to tea.”\n\n“Oh, that’s all right,” he said carelessly. “I don’t want to put you\nto any trouble.”\n\n“What day would suit you?”\n\n“What day would suit you?” he corrected me quickly. “I don’t want to\nput you to any trouble, you see.”\n\n“How about the day after tomorrow?”\n\nHe considered for a moment. Then, with reluctance: “I want to get the\ngrass cut,” he said.\n\nWe both looked down at the grass—there was a sharp line where my\nragged lawn ended and the darker, well-kept expanse of his began. I\nsuspected that he meant my grass.\n\n“There’s another little thing,” he said uncertainly, and hesitated.\n\n“Would you rather put it off for a few days?” I asked.\n\n“Oh, it isn’t about that. At least—” He fumbled with a series of\nbeginnings. “Why, I thought—why, look here, old sport, you don’t make\nmuch money, do you?”\n\n“Not very much.”\n\nThis seemed to reassure him and he continued more confidently.\n\n“I thought you didn’t, if you’ll pardon my—you see, I carry on a\nlittle business on the side, a sort of side line, you understand. And\nI thought that if you don’t make very much—You’re selling bonds,\naren’t you, old sport?”\n\n“Trying to.”\n\n“Well, this would interest you. It wouldn’t take up much of your time\nand you might pick up a nice bit of money. It happens to be a rather\nconfidential sort of thing.”\n\nI realize now that under different circumstances that conversation\nmight have been one of the crises of my life. But, because the offer\nwas obviously and tactlessly for a service to be rendered, I had no\nchoice except to cut him off there.\n\n“I’ve got my hands full,” I said. “I’m much obliged but I couldn’t\ntake on any more work.”\n\n“You wouldn’t have to do any business with Wolfshiem.” Evidently he\nthought that I was shying away from the “gonnegtion” mentioned at\nlunch, but I assured him he was wrong. He waited a moment longer,\nhoping I’d begin a conversation, but I was too absorbed to be\nresponsive, so he went unwillingly home.\n\nThe evening had made me lightheaded and happy; I think I walked into a\ndeep sleep as I entered my front door. So I don’t know whether or not\nGatsby went to Coney Island, or for how many hours he “glanced into\nrooms” while his house blazed gaudily on. I called up Daisy from the\noffice next morning, and invited her to come to tea.\n\n“Don’t bring Tom,” I warned her.\n\n“What?”\n\n“Don’t bring Tom.”\n\n“Who is ‘Tom’?” she asked innocently.\n\nThe day agreed upon was pouring rain. At eleven o’clock a man in a\nraincoat, dragging a lawn-mower, tapped at my front door and said that\nMr. Gatsby had sent him over to cut my grass. This reminded me that I\nhad forgotten to tell my Finn to come back, so I drove into West Egg\nVillage to search for her among soggy whitewashed alleys and to buy\nsome cups and lemons and flowers.\n\nThe flowers were unnecessary, for at two o’clock a greenhouse arrived\nfrom Gatsby’s, with innumerable receptacles to contain it. An hour\nlater the front door opened nervously, and Gatsby in a white flannel\nsuit, silver shirt, and gold-coloured tie, hurried in. He was pale,\nand there were dark signs of sleeplessness beneath his eyes.\n\n“Is everything all right?” he asked immediately.\n\n“The grass looks fine, if that’s what you mean.”\n\n“What grass?” he inquired blankly. “Oh, the grass in the yard.” He\nlooked out the window at it, but, judging from his expression, I don’t\nbelieve he saw a thing.\n\n“Looks very good,” he remarked vaguely. “One of the papers said they\nthought the rain would stop about four. I think it was The\nJournal. Have you got everything you need in the shape of—of tea?”\n\nI took him into the pantry, where he looked a little reproachfully at\nthe Finn. Together we scrutinized the twelve lemon cakes from the\ndelicatessen shop.\n\n“Will they do?” I asked.\n\n“Of course, of course! They’re fine!” and he added hollowly, “… old\nsport.”\n\nThe rain cooled about half-past three to a damp mist, through which\noccasional thin drops swam like dew. Gatsby looked with vacant eyes\nthrough a copy of Clay’s Economics, starting at the Finnish tread that\nshook the kitchen floor, and peering towards the bleared windows from\ntime to time as if a series of invisible but alarming happenings were\ntaking place outside. Finally he got up and informed me, in an\nuncertain voice, that he was going home.\n\n“Why’s that?”\n\n“Nobody’s coming to tea. It’s too late!” He looked at his watch as if\nthere was some pressing demand on his time elsewhere. “I can’t wait\nall day.”\n\n“Don’t be silly; it’s just two minutes to four.”\n\nHe sat down miserably, as if I had pushed him, and simultaneously\nthere was the sound of a motor turning into my lane. We both jumped\nup, and, a little harrowed myself, I went out into the yard.\n\nUnder the dripping bare lilac-trees a large open car was coming up the\ndrive. It stopped. Daisy’s face, tipped sideways beneath a\nthree-cornered lavender hat, looked out at me with a bright ecstatic\nsmile.\n\n“Is this absolutely where you live, my dearest one?”\n\nThe exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I\nhad to follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear\nalone, before any words came through. A damp streak of hair lay like a\ndash of blue paint across her cheek, and her hand was wet with\nglistening drops as I took it to help her from the car.\n\n“Are you in love with me,” she said low in my ear, “or why did I have\nto come alone?”\n\n“That’s the secret of Castle Rackrent. Tell your chauffeur to go far\naway and spend an hour.”\n\n“Come back in an hour, Ferdie.” Then in a grave murmur: “His name is\nFerdie.”\n\n“Does the gasoline affect his nose?”\n\n“I don’t think so,” she said innocently. “Why?”\n\nWe went in. To my overwhelming surprise the living-room was deserted.\n\n“Well, that’s funny,” I exclaimed.\n\n“What’s funny?”\n\nShe turned her head as there was a light dignified knocking at the\nfront door. I went out and opened it. Gatsby, pale as death, with his\nhands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a\npuddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes.\n\nWith his hands still in his coat pockets he stalked by me into the\nhall, turned sharply as if he were on a wire, and disappeared into the\nliving-room. It wasn’t a bit funny. Aware of the loud beating of my\nown heart I pulled the door to against the increasing rain.\n\nFor half a minute there wasn’t a sound. Then from the living-room I\nheard a sort of choking murmur and part of a laugh, followed by\nDaisy’s voice on a clear artificial note:\n\n“I certainly am awfully glad to see you again.”\n\nA pause; it endured horribly. I had nothing to do in the hall, so I\nwent into the room.\n\nGatsby, his hands still in his pockets, was reclining against the\nmantelpiece in a strained counterfeit of perfect ease, even of\nboredom. His head leaned back so far that it rested against the face\nof a defunct mantelpiece clock, and from this position his distraught\neyes stared down at Daisy, who was sitting, frightened but graceful,\non the edge of a stiff chair.\n\n“We’ve met before,” muttered Gatsby. His eyes glanced momentarily at\nme, and his lips parted with an abortive attempt at a laugh. Luckily\nthe clock took this moment to tilt dangerously at the pressure of his\nhead, whereupon he turned and caught it with trembling fingers, and\nset it back in place. Then he sat down, rigidly, his elbow on the arm\nof the sofa and his chin in his hand.\n\n“I’m sorry about the clock,” he said.\n\nMy own face had now assumed a deep tropical burn. I couldn’t muster up\na single commonplace out of the thousand in my head.\n\n“It’s an old clock,” I told them idiotically.\n\nI think we all believed for a moment that it had smashed in pieces on\nthe floor.\n\n“We haven’t met for many years,” said Daisy, her voice as\nmatter-of-fact as it could ever be.\n\n“Five years next November.”\n\nThe automatic quality of Gatsby’s answer set us all back at least\nanother minute. I had them both on their feet with the desperate\nsuggestion that they help me make tea in the kitchen when the demoniac\nFinn brought it in on a tray.\n\nAmid the welcome confusion of cups and cakes a certain physical\ndecency established itself. Gatsby got himself into a shadow and,\nwhile Daisy and I talked, looked conscientiously from one to the other\nof us with tense, unhappy eyes. However, as calmness wasn’t an end in\nitself, I made an excuse at the first possible moment, and got to my\nfeet.\n\n“Where are you going?” demanded Gatsby in immediate alarm.\n\n“I’ll be back.”\n\n“I’ve got to speak to you about something before you go.”\n\nHe followed me wildly into the kitchen, closed the door, and\nwhispered: “Oh, God!” in a miserable way.\n\n“What’s the matter?”\n\n“This is a terrible mistake,” he said, shaking his head from side to\nside, “a terrible, terrible mistake.”\n\n“You’re just embarrassed, that’s all,” and luckily I added: “Daisy’s\nembarrassed too.”\n\n“She’s embarrassed?” he repeated incredulously.\n\n“Just as much as you are.”\n\n“Don’t talk so loud.”\n\n“You’re acting like a little boy,” I broke out impatiently. “Not only\nthat, but you’re rude. Daisy’s sitting in there all alone.”\n\nHe raised his hand to stop my words, looked at me with unforgettable\nreproach, and, opening the door cautiously, went back into the other\nroom.\n\nI walked out the back way—just as Gatsby had when he had made his\nnervous circuit of the house half an hour before—and ran for a huge\nblack knotted tree, whose massed leaves made a fabric against the\nrain. Once more it was pouring, and my irregular lawn, well-shaved by\nGatsby’s gardener, abounded in small muddy swamps and prehistoric\nmarshes. There was nothing to look at from under the tree except\nGatsby’s enormous house, so I stared at it, like Kant at his church\nsteeple, for half an hour. A brewer had built it early in the “period”\ncraze, a decade before, and there was a story that he’d agreed to pay\nfive years’ taxes on all the neighbouring cottages if the owners would\nhave their roofs thatched with straw. Perhaps their refusal took the\nheart out of his plan to Found a Family—he went into an immediate\ndecline. His children sold his house with the black wreath still on\nthe door. Americans, while willing, even eager, to be serfs, have\nalways been obstinate about being peasantry.\n\nAfter half an hour, the sun shone again, and the grocer’s automobile\nrounded Gatsby’s drive with the raw material for his servants’\ndinner—I felt sure he wouldn’t eat a spoonful. A maid began opening\nthe upper windows of his house, appeared momentarily in each, and,\nleaning from the large central bay, spat meditatively into the\ngarden. It was time I went back. While the rain continued it had\nseemed like the murmur of their voices, rising and swelling a little\nnow and then with gusts of emotion. But in the new silence I felt that\nsilence had fallen within the house too.\n\nI went in—after making every possible noise in the kitchen, short of\npushing over the stove—but I don’t believe they heard a sound. They\nwere sitting at either end of the couch, looking at each other as if\nsome question had been asked, or was in the air, and every vestige of\nembarrassment was gone. Daisy’s face was smeared with tears, and when\nI came in she jumped up and began wiping at it with her handkerchief\nbefore a mirror. But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply\nconfounding. He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of\nexultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little\nroom.\n\n“Oh, hello, old sport,” he said, as if he hadn’t seen me for years. I\nthought for a moment he was going to shake hands.\n\n“It’s stopped raining.”\n\n“Has it?” When he realized what I was talking about, that there were\ntwinkle-bells of sunshine in the room, he smiled like a weather man,\nlike an ecstatic patron of recurrent light, and repeated the news to\nDaisy. “What do you think of that? It’s stopped raining.”\n\n“I’m glad, Jay.” Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told\nonly of her unexpected joy.\n\n“I want you and Daisy to come over to my house,” he said, “I’d like to\nshow her around.”\n\n“You’re sure you want me to come?”\n\n“Absolutely, old sport.”\n\nDaisy went upstairs to wash her face—too late I thought with\nhumiliation of my towels—while Gatsby and I waited on the lawn.\n\n“My house looks well, doesn’t it?” he demanded. “See how the whole\nfront of it catches the light.”\n\nI agreed that it was splendid.\n\n“Yes.” His eyes went over it, every arched door and square tower. “It\ntook me just three years to earn the money that bought it.”\n\n“I thought you inherited your money.”\n\n“I did, old sport,” he said automatically, “but I lost most of it in\nthe big panic—the panic of the war.”\n\nI think he hardly knew what he was saying, for when I asked him what\nbusiness he was in he answered: “That’s my affair,” before he realized\nthat it wasn’t an appropriate reply.\n\n“Oh, I’ve been in several things,” he corrected himself. “I was in the\ndrug business and then I was in the oil business. But I’m not in\neither one now.” He looked at me with more attention. “Do you mean\nyou’ve been thinking over what I proposed the other night?”\n\nBefore I could answer, Daisy came out of the house and two rows of\nbrass buttons on her dress gleamed in the sunlight.\n\n“That huge place there?” she cried pointing.\n\n“Do you like it?”\n\n“I love it, but I don’t see how you live there all alone.”\n\n“I keep it always full of interesting people, night and day. People\nwho do interesting things. Celebrated people.”\n\nInstead of taking the shortcut along the Sound we went down to the\nroad and entered by the big postern. With enchanting murmurs Daisy\nadmired this aspect or that of the feudal silhouette against the sky,\nadmired the gardens, the sparkling odour of jonquils and the frothy\nodour of hawthorn and plum blossoms and the pale gold odour of\nkiss-me-at-the-gate. It was strange to reach the marble steps and find\nno stir of bright dresses in and out the door, and hear no sound but\nbird voices in the trees.\n\nAnd inside, as we wandered through Marie Antoinette music-rooms and\nRestoration Salons, I felt that there were guests concealed behind\nevery couch and table, under orders to be breathlessly silent until we\nhad passed through. As Gatsby closed the door of “the Merton College\nLibrary” I could have sworn I heard the owl-eyed man break into\nghostly laughter.\n\nWe went upstairs, through period bedrooms swathed in rose and lavender\nsilk and vivid with new flowers, through dressing-rooms and poolrooms,\nand bathrooms with sunken baths—intruding into one chamber where a\ndishevelled man in pyjamas was doing liver exercises on the floor. It\nwas Mr. Klipspringer, the “boarder.” I had seen him wandering hungrily\nabout the beach that morning. Finally we came to Gatsby’s own\napartment, a bedroom and a bath, and an Adam’s study, where we sat\ndown and drank a glass of some Chartreuse he took from a cupboard in\nthe wall.\n\nHe hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued\neverything in his house according to the measure of response it drew\nfrom her well-loved eyes. Sometimes too, he stared around at his\npossessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding\npresence none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly toppled down a\nflight of stairs.\n\nHis bedroom was the simplest room of all—except where the dresser was\ngarnished with a toilet set of pure dull gold. Daisy took the brush\nwith delight, and smoothed her hair, whereupon Gatsby sat down and\nshaded his eyes and began to laugh.\n\n“It’s the funniest thing, old sport,” he said hilariously. “I\ncan’t—When I try to—”\n\nHe had passed visibly through two states and was entering upon a\nthird. After his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed\nwith wonder at her presence. He had been full of the idea so long,\ndreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to\nspeak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction,\nhe was running down like an over-wound clock.\n\nRecovering himself in a minute he opened for us two hulking patent\ncabinets which held his massed suits and dressing-gowns and ties, and\nhis shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.\n\n“I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a\nselection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall.”\n\nHe took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one,\nbefore us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel,\nwhich lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in\nmany-coloured disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft\nrich heap mounted higher—shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in\ncoral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of\nindian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into\nthe shirts and began to cry stormily.\n\n“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the\nthick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such\nbeautiful shirts before.”\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nAfter the house, we were to see the grounds and the swimming pool, and\nthe hydroplane, and the midsummer flowers—but outside Gatsby’s window\nit began to rain again, so we stood in a row looking at the corrugated\nsurface of the Sound.\n\n“If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay,”\nsaid Gatsby. “You always have a green light that burns all night at\nthe end of your dock.”\n\nDaisy put her arm through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what\nhe had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal\nsignificance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the\ngreat distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very\nnear to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to\nthe moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of\nenchanted objects had diminished by one.\n\nI began to walk about the room, examining various indefinite objects\nin the half darkness. A large photograph of an elderly man in yachting\ncostume attracted me, hung on the wall over his desk.\n\n“Who’s this?”\n\n“That? That’s Mr. Dan Cody, old sport.”\n\nThe name sounded faintly familiar.\n\n“He’s dead now. He used to be my best friend years ago.”\n\nThere was a small picture of Gatsby, also in yachting costume, on the\nbureau—Gatsby with his head thrown back defiantly—taken apparently\nwhen he was about eighteen.\n\n“I adore it,” exclaimed Daisy. “The pompadour! You never told me you\nhad a pompadour—or a yacht.”\n\n“Look at this,” said Gatsby quickly. “Here’s a lot of clippings—about\nyou.”\n\nThey stood side by side examining it. I was going to ask to see the\nrubies when the phone rang, and Gatsby took up the receiver.\n\n“Yes … Well, I can’t talk now … I can’t talk now, old sport … I said a\nsmall town … He must know what a small town is … Well, he’s no use to\nus if Detroit is his idea of a small town …”\n\nHe rang off.\n\n“Come here quick!” cried Daisy at the window.\n\nThe rain was still falling, but the darkness had parted in the west,\nand there was a pink and golden billow of foamy clouds above the sea.\n\n“Look at that,” she whispered, and then after a moment: “I’d like to\njust get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you\naround.”\n\nI tried to go then, but they wouldn’t hear of it; perhaps my presence\nmade them feel more satisfactorily alone.\n\n“I know what we’ll do,” said Gatsby, “we’ll have Klipspringer play the\npiano.”\n\nHe went out of the room calling “Ewing!” and returned in a few minutes\naccompanied by an embarrassed, slightly worn young man, with\nshell-rimmed glasses and scanty blond hair. He was now decently\nclothed in a “sport shirt,” open at the neck, sneakers, and duck\ntrousers of a nebulous hue.\n\n“Did we interrupt your exercise?” inquired Daisy politely.\n\n“I was asleep,” cried Mr. Klipspringer, in a spasm of embarrassment.\n“That is, I’d been asleep. Then I got up …”\n\n“Klipspringer plays the piano,” said Gatsby, cutting him off. “Don’t\nyou, Ewing, old sport?”\n\n“I don’t play well. I don’t—hardly play at all. I’m all out of prac—”\n\n“We’ll go downstairs,” interrupted Gatsby. He flipped a switch. The\ngrey windows disappeared as the house glowed full of light.\n\nIn the music-room Gatsby turned on a solitary lamp beside the piano.\nHe lit Daisy’s cigarette from a trembling match, and sat down with her\non a couch far across the room, where there was no light save what the\ngleaming floor bounced in from the hall.\n\nWhen Klipspringer had played “The Love Nest” he turned around on the\nbench and searched unhappily for Gatsby in the gloom.\n\n“I’m all out of practice, you see. I told you I couldn’t play. I’m all\nout of prac—”\n\n“Don’t talk so much, old sport,” commanded Gatsby. “Play!”\n\n “In the morning, In the evening, Ain’t we got fun—”\n\nOutside the wind was loud and there was a faint flow of thunder along\nthe Sound. All the lights were going on in West Egg now; the electric\ntrains, men-carrying, were plunging home through the rain from New\nYork. It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was\ngenerating on the air.\n\n “One thing’s sure and nothing’s surer The rich get richer and the\n poor get—children. In the meantime, In between time—”\n\nAs I went over to say goodbye I saw that the expression of\nbewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt\nhad occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost\nfive years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when\nDaisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault, but\nbecause of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond\nher, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative\npassion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright\nfeather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can\nchallenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.\n\nAs I watched him he adjusted himself a little, visibly. His hand took\nhold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear he turned\ntoward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most,\nwith its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn’t be\nover-dreamed—that voice was a deathless song.\n\nThey had forgotten me, but Daisy glanced up and held out her hand;\nGatsby didn’t know me now at all. I looked once more at them and they\nlooked back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life. Then I went\nout of the room and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them\nthere together.\n\n\n                                  VI\n\nAbout this time an ambitious young reporter from New York arrived one\nmorning at Gatsby’s door and asked him if he had anything to say.\n\n“Anything to say about what?” inquired Gatsby politely.\n\n“Why—any statement to give out.”\n\nIt transpired after a confused five minutes that the man had heard\nGatsby’s name around his office in a connection which he either\nwouldn’t reveal or didn’t fully understand. This was his day off and\nwith laudable initiative he had hurried out “to see.”\n\nIt was a random shot, and yet the reporter’s instinct was right.\nGatsby’s notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his\nhospitality and so become authorities upon his past, had increased all\nsummer until he fell just short of being news. Contemporary legends\nsuch as the “underground pipeline to Canada” attached themselves to\nhim, and there was one persistent story that he didn’t live in a house\nat all, but in a boat that looked like a house and was moved secretly\nup and down the Long Island shore. Just why these inventions were a\nsource of satisfaction to James Gatz of North Dakota, isn’t easy to\nsay.\n\nJames Gatz—that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had\nchanged it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that\nwitnessed the beginning of his career—when he saw Dan Cody’s yacht\ndrop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior. It was\nJames Gatz who had been loafing along the beach that afternoon in a\ntorn green jersey and a pair of canvas pants, but it was already Jay\nGatsby who borrowed a rowboat, pulled out to the Tuolomee, and\ninformed Cody that a wind might catch him and break him up in half an\nhour.\n\nI suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then. His\nparents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people—his imagination\nhad never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was\nthat Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic\nconception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means\nanything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business,\nthe service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented\njust the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be\nlikely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.\n\nFor over a year he had been beating his way along the south shore of\nLake Superior as a clam-digger and a salmon-fisher or in any other\ncapacity that brought him food and bed. His brown, hardening body\nlived naturally through the half-fierce, half-lazy work of the bracing\ndays. He knew women early, and since they spoiled him he became\ncontemptuous of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of\nthe others because they were hysterical about things which in his\noverwhelming self-absorption he took for granted.\n\nBut his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque\nand fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of\nineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock\nticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled\nclothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his\nfancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an\noblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for\nhis imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of\nreality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on\na fairy’s wing.\n\nAn instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months before,\nto the small Lutheran College of St. Olaf’s in southern Minnesota. He\nstayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the\ndrums of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor’s\nwork with which he was to pay his way through. Then he drifted back to\nLake Superior, and he was still searching for something to do on the\nday that Dan Cody’s yacht dropped anchor in the shallows alongshore.\n\nCody was fifty years old then, a product of the Nevada silver fields,\nof the Yukon, of every rush for metal since seventy-five. The\ntransactions in Montana copper that made him many times a millionaire\nfound him physically robust but on the verge of soft-mindedness, and,\nsuspecting this, an infinite number of women tried to separate him\nfrom his money. The none too savoury ramifications by which Ella Kaye,\nthe newspaper woman, played Madame de Maintenon to his weakness and\nsent him to sea in a yacht, were common property of the turgid\njournalism in 1902. He had been coasting along all too hospitable\nshores for five years when he turned up as James Gatz’s destiny in\nLittle Girl Bay.\n\nTo young Gatz, resting on his oars and looking up at the railed deck,\nthat yacht represented all the beauty and glamour in the world. I\nsuppose he smiled at Cody—he had probably discovered that people liked\nhim when he smiled. At any rate Cody asked him a few questions (one of\nthem elicited the brand new name) and found that he was quick and\nextravagantly ambitious. A few days later he took him to Duluth and\nbought him a blue coat, six pairs of white duck trousers, and a\nyachting cap. And when the Tuolomee left for the West Indies and the\nBarbary Coast, Gatsby left too.\n\nHe was employed in a vague personal capacity—while he remained with\nCody he was in turn steward, mate, skipper, secretary, and even\njailor, for Dan Cody sober knew what lavish doings Dan Cody drunk\nmight soon be about, and he provided for such contingencies by\nreposing more and more trust in Gatsby. The arrangement lasted five\nyears, during which the boat went three times around the Continent.\nIt might have lasted indefinitely except for the fact that Ella Kaye\ncame on board one night in Boston and a week later Dan Cody\ninhospitably died.\n\nI remember the portrait of him up in Gatsby’s bedroom, a grey, florid\nman with a hard, empty face—the pioneer debauchee, who during one\nphase of American life brought back to the Eastern seaboard the savage\nviolence of the frontier brothel and saloon. It was indirectly due to\nCody that Gatsby drank so little. Sometimes in the course of gay\nparties women used to rub champagne into his hair; for himself he\nformed the habit of letting liquor alone.\n\nAnd it was from Cody that he inherited money—a legacy of twenty-five\nthousand dollars. He didn’t get it. He never understood the legal\ndevice that was used against him, but what remained of the millions\nwent intact to Ella Kaye. He was left with his singularly appropriate\neducation; the vague contour of Jay Gatsby had filled out to the\nsubstantiality of a man.\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nHe told me all this very much later, but I’ve put it down here with\nthe idea of exploding those first wild rumours about his antecedents,\nwhich weren’t even faintly true. Moreover he told it to me at a time\nof confusion, when I had reached the point of believing everything and\nnothing about him. So I take advantage of this short halt, while\nGatsby, so to speak, caught his breath, to clear this set of\nmisconceptions away.\n\nIt was a halt, too, in my association with his affairs. For several\nweeks I didn’t see him or hear his voice on the phone—mostly I was in\nNew York, trotting around with Jordan and trying to ingratiate myself\nwith her senile aunt—but finally I went over to his house one Sunday\nafternoon. I hadn’t been there two minutes when somebody brought Tom\nBuchanan in for a drink. I was startled, naturally, but the really\nsurprising thing was that it hadn’t happened before.\n\nThey were a party of three on horseback—Tom and a man named Sloane and\na pretty woman in a brown riding-habit, who had been there previously.\n\n“I’m delighted to see you,” said Gatsby, standing on his porch. “I’m\ndelighted that you dropped in.”\n\nAs though they cared!\n\n“Sit right down. Have a cigarette or a cigar.” He walked around the\nroom quickly, ringing bells. “I’ll have something to drink for you in\njust a minute.”\n\nHe was profoundly affected by the fact that Tom was there. But he\nwould be uneasy anyhow until he had given them something, realizing in\na vague way that that was all they came for. Mr. Sloane wanted\nnothing. A lemonade? No, thanks. A little champagne? Nothing at all,\nthanks … I’m sorry—\n\n“Did you have a nice ride?”\n\n“Very good roads around here.”\n\n“I suppose the automobiles—”\n\n“Yeah.”\n\nMoved by an irresistible impulse, Gatsby turned to Tom, who had\naccepted the introduction as a stranger.\n\n“I believe we’ve met somewhere before, Mr. Buchanan.”\n\n“Oh, yes,” said Tom, gruffly polite, but obviously not remembering.\n“So we did. I remember very well.”\n\n“About two weeks ago.”\n\n“That’s right. You were with Nick here.”\n\n“I know your wife,” continued Gatsby, almost aggressively.\n\n“That so?”\n\nTom turned to me.\n\n“You live near here, Nick?”\n\n“Next door.”\n\n“That so?”\n\nMr. Sloane didn’t enter into the conversation, but lounged back\nhaughtily in his chair; the woman said nothing either—until\nunexpectedly, after two highballs, she became cordial.\n\n“We’ll all come over to your next party, Mr. Gatsby,” she suggested.\n“What do you say?”\n\n“Certainly; I’d be delighted to have you.”\n\n“Be ver’ nice,” said Mr. Sloane, without gratitude. “Well—think ought\nto be starting home.”\n\n“Please don’t hurry,” Gatsby urged them. He had control of himself\nnow, and he wanted to see more of Tom. “Why don’t you—why don’t you\nstay for supper? I wouldn’t be surprised if some other people dropped\nin from New York.”\n\n“You come to supper with me,” said the lady enthusiastically. “Both of\nyou.”\n\nThis included me. Mr. Sloane got to his feet.\n\n“Come along,” he said—but to her only.\n\n“I mean it,” she insisted. “I’d love to have you. Lots of room.”\n\nGatsby looked at me questioningly. He wanted to go and he didn’t see\nthat Mr. Sloane had determined he shouldn’t.\n\n“I’m afraid I won’t be able to,” I said.\n\n“Well, you come,” she urged, concentrating on Gatsby.\n\nMr. Sloane murmured something close to her ear.\n\n“We won’t be late if we start now,” she insisted aloud.\n\n“I haven’t got a horse,” said Gatsby. “I used to ride in the army, but\nI’ve never bought a horse. I’ll have to follow you in my car. Excuse\nme for just a minute.”\n\nThe rest of us walked out on the porch, where Sloane and the lady\nbegan an impassioned conversation aside.\n\n“My God, I believe the man’s coming,” said Tom. “Doesn’t he know she\ndoesn’t want him?”\n\n“She says she does want him.”\n\n“She has a big dinner party and he won’t know a soul there.” He\nfrowned. “I wonder where in the devil he met Daisy. By God, I may be\nold-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to\nsuit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.”\n\nSuddenly Mr. Sloane and the lady walked down the steps and mounted\ntheir horses.\n\n“Come on,” said Mr. Sloane to Tom, “we’re late. We’ve got to go.”  And\nthen to me: “Tell him we couldn’t wait, will you?”\n\nTom and I shook hands, the rest of us exchanged a cool nod, and they\ntrotted quickly down the drive, disappearing under the August foliage\njust as Gatsby, with hat and light overcoat in hand, came out the\nfront door.\n\nTom was evidently perturbed at Daisy’s running around alone, for on\nthe following Saturday night he came with her to Gatsby’s\nparty. Perhaps his presence gave the evening its peculiar quality of\noppressiveness—it stands out in my memory from Gatsby’s other parties\nthat summer. There were the same people, or at least the same sort of\npeople, the same profusion of champagne, the same many-coloured,\nmany-keyed commotion, but I felt an unpleasantness in the air, a\npervading harshness that hadn’t been there before. Or perhaps I had\nmerely grown used to it, grown to accept West Egg as a world complete\nin itself, with its own standards and its own great figures, second to\nnothing because it had no consciousness of being so, and now I was\nlooking at it again, through Daisy’s eyes. It is invariably saddening\nto look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your\nown powers of adjustment.\n\nThey arrived at twilight, and, as we strolled out among the sparkling\nhundreds, Daisy’s voice was playing murmurous tricks in her throat.\n\n“These things excite me so,” she whispered. “If you want to kiss me\nany time during the evening, Nick, just let me know and I’ll be glad\nto arrange it for you. Just mention my name. Or present a green card.\nI’m giving out green—”\n\n“Look around,” suggested Gatsby.\n\n“I’m looking around. I’m having a marvellous—”\n\n“You must see the faces of many people you’ve heard about.”\n\nTom’s arrogant eyes roamed the crowd.\n\n“We don’t go around very much,” he said; “in fact, I was just thinking\nI don’t know a soul here.”\n\n“Perhaps you know that lady.” Gatsby indicated a gorgeous, scarcely\nhuman orchid of a woman who sat in state under a white-plum tree. Tom\nand Daisy stared, with that peculiarly unreal feeling that accompanies\nthe recognition of a hitherto ghostly celebrity of the movies.\n\n“She’s lovely,” said Daisy.\n\n“The man bending over her is her director.”\n\nHe took them ceremoniously from group to group:\n\n“Mrs. Buchanan … and Mr. Buchanan—” After an instant’s hesitation he\nadded: “the polo player.”\n\n“Oh no,” objected Tom quickly, “not me.”\n\nBut evidently the sound of it pleased Gatsby for Tom remained “the\npolo player” for the rest of the evening.\n\n“I’ve never met so many celebrities,” Daisy exclaimed. “I liked that\nman—what was his name?—with the sort of blue nose.”\n\nGatsby identified him, adding that he was a small producer.\n\n“Well, I liked him anyhow.”\n\n“I’d a little rather not be the polo player,” said Tom pleasantly,\n“I’d rather look at all these famous people in—in oblivion.”\n\nDaisy and Gatsby danced. I remember being surprised by his graceful,\nconservative foxtrot—I had never seen him dance before. Then they\nsauntered over to my house and sat on the steps for half an hour,\nwhile at her request I remained watchfully in the garden. “In case\nthere’s a fire or a flood,” she explained, “or any act of God.”\n\nTom appeared from his oblivion as we were sitting down to supper\ntogether. “Do you mind if I eat with some people over here?” he\nsaid. “A fellow’s getting off some funny stuff.”\n\n“Go ahead,” answered Daisy genially, “and if you want to take down any\naddresses here’s my little gold pencil.” … She looked around after a\nmoment and told me the girl was “common but pretty,” and I knew that\nexcept for the half-hour she’d been alone with Gatsby she wasn’t\nhaving a good time.\n\nWe were at a particularly tipsy table. That was my fault—Gatsby had\nbeen called to the phone, and I’d enjoyed these same people only two\nweeks before. But what had amused me then turned septic on the air\nnow.\n\n“How do you feel, Miss Baedeker?”\n\nThe girl addressed was trying, unsuccessfully, to slump against my\nshoulder. At this inquiry she sat up and opened her eyes.\n\n“Wha’?”\n\nA massive and lethargic woman, who had been urging Daisy to play golf\nwith her at the local club tomorrow, spoke in Miss Baedeker’s defence:\n\n“Oh, she’s all right now. When she’s had five or six cocktails she\nalways starts screaming like that. I tell her she ought to leave it\nalone.”\n\n“I do leave it alone,” affirmed the accused hollowly.\n\n“We heard you yelling, so I said to Doc Civet here: ‘There’s somebody\nthat needs your help, Doc.’ ”\n\n“She’s much obliged, I’m sure,” said another friend, without\ngratitude, “but you got her dress all wet when you stuck her head in\nthe pool.”\n\n“Anything I hate is to get my head stuck in a pool,” mumbled Miss\nBaedeker. “They almost drowned me once over in New Jersey.”\n\n“Then you ought to leave it alone,” countered Doctor Civet.\n\n“Speak for yourself!” cried Miss Baedeker violently. “Your hand\nshakes. I wouldn’t let you operate on me!”\n\nIt was like that. Almost the last thing I remember was standing with\nDaisy and watching the moving-picture director and his Star. They were\nstill under the white-plum tree and their faces were touching except\nfor a pale, thin ray of moonlight between. It occurred to me that he\nhad been very slowly bending toward her all evening to attain this\nproximity, and even while I watched I saw him stoop one ultimate\ndegree and kiss at her cheek.\n\n“I like her,” said Daisy, “I think she’s lovely.”\n\nBut the rest offended her—and inarguably because it wasn’t a gesture\nbut an emotion. She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented\n“place” that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing\nvillage—appalled by its raw vigour that chafed under the old\neuphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants\nalong a shortcut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in\nthe very simplicity she failed to understand.\n\nI sat on the front steps with them while they waited for their car.\nIt was dark here in front; only the bright door sent ten square feet\nof light volleying out into the soft black morning. Sometimes a shadow\nmoved against a dressing-room blind above, gave way to another shadow,\nan indefinite procession of shadows, who rouged and powdered in an\ninvisible glass.\n\n“Who is this Gatsby anyhow?” demanded Tom suddenly. “Some big\nbootlegger?”\n\n“Where’d you hear that?” I inquired.\n\n“I didn’t hear it. I imagined it. A lot of these newly rich people are\njust big bootleggers, you know.”\n\n“Not Gatsby,” I said shortly.\n\nHe was silent for a moment. The pebbles of the drive crunched under\nhis feet.\n\n“Well, he certainly must have strained himself to get this menagerie\ntogether.”\n\nA breeze stirred the grey haze of Daisy’s fur collar.\n\n“At least they are more interesting than the people we know,” she said\nwith an effort.\n\n“You didn’t look so interested.”\n\n“Well, I was.”\n\nTom laughed and turned to me.\n\n“Did you notice Daisy’s face when that girl asked her to put her under\na cold shower?”\n\nDaisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper,\nbringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and\nwould never have again. When the melody rose her voice broke up\nsweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change\ntipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.\n\n“Lots of people come who haven’t been invited,” she said\nsuddenly. “That girl hadn’t been invited. They simply force their way\nin and he’s too polite to object.”\n\n“I’d like to know who he is and what he does,” insisted Tom. “And I\nthink I’ll make a point of finding out.”\n\n“I can tell you right now,” she answered. “He owned some drugstores, a\nlot of drugstores. He built them up himself.”\n\nThe dilatory limousine came rolling up the drive.\n\n“Good night, Nick,” said Daisy.\n\nHer glance left me and sought the lighted top of the steps, where\n“Three O’Clock in the Morning,” a neat, sad little waltz of that year,\nwas drifting out the open door. After all, in the very casualness of\nGatsby’s party there were romantic possibilities totally absent from\nher world. What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling\nher back inside? What would happen now in the dim, incalculable hours?\nPerhaps some unbelievable guest would arrive, a person infinitely rare\nand to be marvelled at, some authentically radiant young girl who with\none fresh glance at Gatsby, one moment of magical encounter, would\nblot out those five years of unwavering devotion.\n\nI stayed late that night. Gatsby asked me to wait until he was free,\nand I lingered in the garden until the inevitable swimming party had\nrun up, chilled and exalted, from the black beach, until the lights\nwere extinguished in the guestrooms overhead. When he came down the\nsteps at last the tanned skin was drawn unusually tight on his face,\nand his eyes were bright and tired.\n\n“She didn’t like it,” he said immediately.\n\n“Of course she did.”\n\n“She didn’t like it,” he insisted. “She didn’t have a good time.”\n\nHe was silent, and I guessed at his unutterable depression.\n\n“I feel far away from her,” he said. “It’s hard to make her\nunderstand.”\n\n“You mean about the dance?”\n\n“The dance?” He dismissed all the dances he had given with a snap of\nhis fingers. “Old sport, the dance is unimportant.”\n\nHe wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and\nsay: “I never loved you.” After she had obliterated four years with\nthat sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be\ntaken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back\nto Louisville and be married from her house—just as if it were five\nyears ago.\n\n“And she doesn’t understand,” he said. “She used to be able to\nunderstand. We’d sit for hours—”\n\nHe broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit\nrinds and discarded favours and crushed flowers.\n\n“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the\npast.”\n\n“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you\ncan!”\n\nHe looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the\nshadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.\n\n“I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he said,\nnodding determinedly. “She’ll see.”\n\nHe talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to\nrecover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into\nloving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then,\nbut if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it\nall slowly, he could find out what that thing was …\n\n… One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the\nstreet when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where\nthere were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They\nstopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night\nwith that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes\nof the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the\ndarkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the\ncorner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really\nformed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could\nclimb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the\npap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.\n\nHis heart beat faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He\nknew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable\nvisions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like\nthe mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the\ntuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At\nhis lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the\nincarnation was complete.\n\nThrough all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was\nreminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words,\nthat I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase\ntried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s,\nas though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled\nair. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was\nuncommunicable forever.\n\n\n                                 VII\n\nIt was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights\nin his house failed to go on one Saturday night—and, as obscurely as\nit had begun, his career as Trimalchio was over. Only gradually did I\nbecome aware that the automobiles which turned expectantly into his\ndrive stayed for just a minute and then drove sulkily away. Wondering\nif he were sick I went over to find out—an unfamiliar butler with a\nvillainous face squinted at me suspiciously from the door.\n\n“Is Mr. Gatsby sick?”\n\n“Nope.” After a pause he added “sir” in a dilatory, grudging way.\n\n“I hadn’t seen him around, and I was rather worried. Tell him Mr.\nCarraway came over.”\n\n“Who?” he demanded rudely.\n\n“Carraway.”\n\n“Carraway. All right, I’ll tell him.”\n\nAbruptly he slammed the door.\n\nMy Finn informed me that Gatsby had dismissed every servant in his\nhouse a week ago and replaced them with half a dozen others, who never\nwent into West Egg village to be bribed by the tradesmen, but ordered\nmoderate supplies over the telephone. The grocery boy reported that\nthe kitchen looked like a pigsty, and the general opinion in the\nvillage was that the new people weren’t servants at all.\n\nNext day Gatsby called me on the phone.\n\n“Going away?” I inquired.\n\n“No, old sport.”\n\n“I hear you fired all your servants.”\n\n“I wanted somebody who wouldn’t gossip. Daisy comes over quite\noften—in the afternoons.”\n\nSo the whole caravansary had fallen in like a card house at the\ndisapproval in her eyes.\n\n“They’re some people Wolfshiem wanted to do something for. They’re all\nbrothers and sisters. They used to run a small hotel.”\n\n“I see.”\n\nHe was calling up at Daisy’s request—would I come to lunch at her\nhouse tomorrow? Miss Baker would be there. Half an hour later Daisy\nherself telephoned and seemed relieved to find that I was\ncoming. Something was up. And yet I couldn’t believe that they would\nchoose this occasion for a scene—especially for the rather harrowing\nscene that Gatsby had outlined in the garden.\n\nThe next day was broiling, almost the last, certainly the warmest, of\nthe summer. As my train emerged from the tunnel into sunlight, only\nthe hot whistles of the National Biscuit Company broke the simmering\nhush at noon. The straw seats of the car hovered on the edge of\ncombustion; the woman next to me perspired delicately for a while into\nher white shirtwaist, and then, as her newspaper dampened under her\nfingers, lapsed despairingly into deep heat with a desolate cry. Her\npocketbook slapped to the floor.\n\n“Oh, my!” she gasped.\n\nI picked it up with a weary bend and handed it back to her, holding it\nat arm’s length and by the extreme tip of the corners to indicate that\nI had no designs upon it—but everyone near by, including the woman,\nsuspected me just the same.\n\n“Hot!” said the conductor to familiar faces. “Some weather! … Hot! …\nHot! … Hot! … Is it hot enough for you? Is it hot? Is it … ?”\n\nMy commutation ticket came back to me with a dark stain from his hand.\nThat anyone should care in this heat whose flushed lips he kissed,\nwhose head made damp the pyjama pocket over his heart!\n\n… Through the hall of the Buchanans’ house blew a faint wind, carrying\nthe sound of the telephone bell out to Gatsby and me as we waited at\nthe door.\n\n“The master’s body?” roared the butler into the mouthpiece. “I’m\nsorry, madame, but we can’t furnish it—it’s far too hot to touch this\nnoon!”\n\nWhat he really said was: “Yes … Yes … I’ll see.”\n\nHe set down the receiver and came toward us, glistening slightly, to\ntake our stiff straw hats.\n\n“Madame expects you in the salon!” he cried, needlessly indicating the\ndirection. In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the\ncommon store of life.\n\nThe room, shadowed well with awnings, was dark and cool. Daisy and\nJordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols weighing down\ntheir own white dresses against the singing breeze of the fans.\n\n“We can’t move,” they said together.\n\nJordan’s fingers, powdered white over their tan, rested for a moment\nin mine.\n\n“And Mr. Thomas Buchanan, the athlete?” I inquired.\n\nSimultaneously I heard his voice, gruff, muffled, husky, at the hall\ntelephone.\n\nGatsby stood in the centre of the crimson carpet and gazed around with\nfascinated eyes. Daisy watched him and laughed, her sweet, exciting\nlaugh; a tiny gust of powder rose from her bosom into the air.\n\n“The rumour is,” whispered Jordan, “that that’s Tom’s girl on the\ntelephone.”\n\nWe were silent. The voice in the hall rose high with annoyance: “Very\nwell, then, I won’t sell you the car at all … I’m under no obligations\nto you at all … and as for your bothering me about it at lunch time, I\nwon’t stand that at all!”\n\n“Holding down the receiver,” said Daisy cynically.\n\n“No, he’s not,” I assured her. “It’s a bona-fide deal. I happen to\nknow about it.”\n\nTom flung open the door, blocked out its space for a moment with his\nthick body, and hurried into the room.\n\n“Mr. Gatsby!” He put out his broad, flat hand with well-concealed\ndislike. “I’m glad to see you, sir … Nick …”\n\n“Make us a cold drink,” cried Daisy.\n\nAs he left the room again she got up and went over to Gatsby and\npulled his face down, kissing him on the mouth.\n\n“You know I love you,” she murmured.\n\n“You forget there’s a lady present,” said Jordan.\n\nDaisy looked around doubtfully.\n\n“You kiss Nick too.”\n\n“What a low, vulgar girl!”\n\n“I don’t care!” cried Daisy, and began to clog on the brick fireplace.\nThen she remembered the heat and sat down guiltily on the couch just\nas a freshly laundered nurse leading a little girl came into the room.\n\n“Bles-sed pre-cious,” she crooned, holding out her arms. “Come to your\nown mother that loves you.”\n\nThe child, relinquished by the nurse, rushed across the room and\nrooted shyly into her mother’s dress.\n\n“The bles-sed pre-cious! Did mother get powder on your old yellowy\nhair? Stand up now, and say—How-de-do.”\n\nGatsby and I in turn leaned down and took the small reluctant hand.\nAfterward he kept looking at the child with surprise. I don’t think he\nhad ever really believed in its existence before.\n\n“I got dressed before luncheon,” said the child, turning eagerly to\nDaisy.\n\n“That’s because your mother wanted to show you off.” Her face bent\ninto the single wrinkle of the small white neck. “You dream, you. You\nabsolute little dream.”\n\n“Yes,” admitted the child calmly. “Aunt Jordan’s got on a white dress\ntoo.”\n\n“How do you like mother’s friends?” Daisy turned her around so that\nshe faced Gatsby. “Do you think they’re pretty?”\n\n“Where’s Daddy?”\n\n“She doesn’t look like her father,” explained Daisy. “She looks like\nme. She’s got my hair and shape of the face.”\n\nDaisy sat back upon the couch. The nurse took a step forward and held\nout her hand.\n\n“Come, Pammy.”\n\n“Goodbye, sweetheart!”\n\nWith a reluctant backward glance the well-disciplined child held to\nher nurse’s hand and was pulled out the door, just as Tom came back,\npreceding four gin rickeys that clicked full of ice.\n\nGatsby took up his drink.\n\n“They certainly look cool,” he said, with visible tension.\n\nWe drank in long, greedy swallows.\n\n“I read somewhere that the sun’s getting hotter every year,” said Tom\ngenially. “It seems that pretty soon the earth’s going to fall into\nthe sun—or wait a minute—it’s just the opposite—the sun’s getting\ncolder every year.\n\n“Come outside,” he suggested to Gatsby, “I’d like you to have a look\nat the place.”\n\nI went with them out to the veranda. On the green Sound, stagnant in\nthe heat, one small sail crawled slowly toward the fresher sea.\nGatsby’s eyes followed it momentarily; he raised his hand and pointed\nacross the bay.\n\n“I’m right across from you.”\n\n“So you are.”\n\nOur eyes lifted over the rose-beds and the hot lawn and the weedy\nrefuse of the dog-days alongshore. Slowly the white wings of the boat\nmoved against the blue cool limit of the sky. Ahead lay the scalloped\nocean and the abounding blessed isles.\n\n“There’s sport for you,” said Tom, nodding. “I’d like to be out there\nwith him for about an hour.”\n\nWe had luncheon in the dining-room, darkened too against the heat, and\ndrank down nervous gaiety with the cold ale.\n\n“What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon?” cried Daisy, “and the\nday after that, and the next thirty years?”\n\n“Don’t be morbid,” Jordan said. “Life starts all over again when it\ngets crisp in the fall.”\n\n“But it’s so hot,” insisted Daisy, on the verge of tears, “and\neverything’s so confused. Let’s all go to town!”\n\nHer voice struggled on through the heat, beating against it, moulding\nits senselessness into forms.\n\n“I’ve heard of making a garage out of a stable,” Tom was saying to\nGatsby, “but I’m the first man who ever made a stable out of a\ngarage.”\n\n“Who wants to go to town?” demanded Daisy insistently. Gatsby’s eyes\nfloated toward her. “Ah,” she cried, “you look so cool.”\n\nTheir eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in\nspace. With an effort she glanced down at the table.\n\n“You always look so cool,” she repeated.\n\nShe had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw. He was\nastounded. His mouth opened a little, and he looked at Gatsby, and\nthen back at Daisy as if he had just recognized her as someone he knew\na long time ago.\n\n“You resemble the advertisement of the man,” she went on innocently.\n“You know the advertisement of the man—”\n\n“All right,” broke in Tom quickly, “I’m perfectly willing to go to\ntown. Come on—we’re all going to town.”\n\nHe got up, his eyes still flashing between Gatsby and his wife. No one\nmoved.\n\n“Come on!” His temper cracked a little. “What’s the matter, anyhow?\nIf we’re going to town, let’s start.”\n\nHis hand, trembling with his effort at self-control, bore to his lips\nthe last of his glass of ale. Daisy’s voice got us to our feet and out\non to the blazing gravel drive.\n\n“Are we just going to go?” she objected. “Like this? Aren’t we going\nto let anyone smoke a cigarette first?”\n\n“Everybody smoked all through lunch.”\n\n“Oh, let’s have fun,” she begged him. “It’s too hot to fuss.”\n\nHe didn’t answer.\n\n“Have it your own way,” she said. “Come on, Jordan.”\n\nThey went upstairs to get ready while we three men stood there\nshuffling the hot pebbles with our feet. A silver curve of the moon\nhovered already in the western sky. Gatsby started to speak, changed\nhis mind, but not before Tom wheeled and faced him expectantly.\n\n“Have you got your stables here?” asked Gatsby with an effort.\n\n“About a quarter of a mile down the road.”\n\n“Oh.”\n\nA pause.\n\n“I don’t see the idea of going to town,” broke out Tom savagely.\n“Women get these notions in their heads—”\n\n“Shall we take anything to drink?” called Daisy from an upper window.\n\n“I’ll get some whisky,” answered Tom. He went inside.\n\nGatsby turned to me rigidly:\n\n“I can’t say anything in his house, old sport.”\n\n“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of—” I\nhesitated.\n\n“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.\n\nThat was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that\nwas the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of\nit, the cymbals’ song of it … High in a white palace the king’s\ndaughter, the golden girl …\n\nTom came out of the house wrapping a quart bottle in a towel, followed\nby Daisy and Jordan wearing small tight hats of metallic cloth and\ncarrying light capes over their arms.\n\n“Shall we all go in my car?” suggested Gatsby. He felt the hot, green\nleather of the seat. “I ought to have left it in the shade.”\n\n“Is it standard shift?” demanded Tom.\n\n“Yes.”\n\n“Well, you take my coupé and let me drive your car to town.”\n\nThe suggestion was distasteful to Gatsby.\n\n“I don’t think there’s much gas,” he objected.\n\n“Plenty of gas,” said Tom boisterously. He looked at the gauge. “And\nif it runs out I can stop at a drugstore. You can buy anything at a\ndrugstore nowadays.”\n\nA pause followed this apparently pointless remark. Daisy looked at Tom\nfrowning, and an indefinable expression, at once definitely unfamiliar\nand vaguely recognizable, as if I had only heard it described in\nwords, passed over Gatsby’s face.\n\n“Come on, Daisy” said Tom, pressing her with his hand toward Gatsby’s\ncar. “I’ll take you in this circus wagon.”\n\nHe opened the door, but she moved out from the circle of his arm.\n\n“You take Nick and Jordan. We’ll follow you in the coupé.”\n\nShe walked close to Gatsby, touching his coat with her hand. Jordan\nand Tom and I got into the front seat of Gatsby’s car, Tom pushed the\nunfamiliar gears tentatively, and we shot off into the oppressive\nheat, leaving them out of sight behind.\n\n“Did you see that?” demanded Tom.\n\n“See what?”\n\nHe looked at me keenly, realizing that Jordan and I must have known\nall along.\n\n“You think I’m pretty dumb, don’t you?” he suggested. “Perhaps I am,\nbut I have a—almost a second sight, sometimes, that tells me what to\ndo. Maybe you don’t believe that, but science—”\n\nHe paused. The immediate contingency overtook him, pulled him back\nfrom the edge of theoretical abyss.\n\n“I’ve made a small investigation of this fellow,” he continued. “I\ncould have gone deeper if I’d known—”\n\n“Do you mean you’ve been to a medium?” inquired Jordan humorously.\n\n“What?” Confused, he stared at us as we laughed. “A medium?”\n\n“About Gatsby.”\n\n“About Gatsby! No, I haven’t. I said I’d been making a small\ninvestigation of his past.”\n\n“And you found he was an Oxford man,” said Jordan helpfully.\n\n“An Oxford man!” He was incredulous. “Like hell he is! He wears a pink\nsuit.”\n\n“Nevertheless he’s an Oxford man.”\n\n“Oxford, New Mexico,” snorted Tom contemptuously, “or something like\nthat.”\n\n“Listen, Tom. If you’re such a snob, why did you invite him to lunch?”\ndemanded Jordan crossly.\n\n“Daisy invited him; she knew him before we were married—God knows\nwhere!”\n\nWe were all irritable now with the fading ale, and aware of it we\ndrove for a while in silence. Then as Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s faded\neyes came into sight down the road, I remembered Gatsby’s caution\nabout gasoline.\n\n“We’ve got enough to get us to town,” said Tom.\n\n“But there’s a garage right here,” objected Jordan. “I don’t want to\nget stalled in this baking heat.”\n\nTom threw on both brakes impatiently, and we slid to an abrupt dusty\nstop under Wilson’s sign. After a moment the proprietor emerged from\nthe interior of his establishment and gazed hollow-eyed at the car.\n\n“Let’s have some gas!” cried Tom roughly. “What do you think we\nstopped for—to admire the view?”\n\n“I’m sick,” said Wilson without moving. “Been sick all day.”\n\n“What’s the matter?”\n\n“I’m all run down.”\n\n“Well, shall I help myself?” Tom demanded. “You sounded well enough on\nthe phone.”\n\nWith an effort Wilson left the shade and support of the doorway and,\nbreathing hard, unscrewed the cap of the tank. In the sunlight his\nface was green.\n\n“I didn’t mean to interrupt your lunch,” he said. “But I need money\npretty bad, and I was wondering what you were going to do with your\nold car.”\n\n“How do you like this one?” inquired Tom. “I bought it last week.”\n\n“It’s a nice yellow one,” said Wilson, as he strained at the handle.\n\n“Like to buy it?”\n\n“Big chance,” Wilson smiled faintly. “No, but I could make some money\non the other.”\n\n“What do you want money for, all of a sudden?”\n\n“I’ve been here too long. I want to get away. My wife and I want to go\nWest.”\n\n“Your wife does,” exclaimed Tom, startled.\n\n“She’s been talking about it for ten years.” He rested for a moment\nagainst the pump, shading his eyes. “And now she’s going whether she\nwants to or not. I’m going to get her away.”\n\nThe coupé flashed by us with a flurry of dust and the flash of a\nwaving hand.\n\n“What do I owe you?” demanded Tom harshly.\n\n“I just got wised up to something funny the last two days,” remarked\nWilson. “That’s why I want to get away. That’s why I been bothering\nyou about the car.”\n\n“What do I owe you?”\n\n“Dollar twenty.”\n\nThe relentless beating heat was beginning to confuse me and I had a\nbad moment there before I realized that so far his suspicions hadn’t\nalighted on Tom. He had discovered that Myrtle had some sort of life\napart from him in another world, and the shock had made him physically\nsick. I stared at him and then at Tom, who had made a parallel\ndiscovery less than an hour before—and it occurred to me that there\nwas no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as\nthe difference between the sick and the well. Wilson was so sick that\nhe looked guilty, unforgivably guilty—as if he had just got some poor\ngirl with child.\n\n“I’ll let you have that car,” said Tom. “I’ll send it over tomorrow\nafternoon.”\n\nThat locality was always vaguely disquieting, even in the broad glare\nof afternoon, and now I turned my head as though I had been warned of\nsomething behind. Over the ash-heaps the giant eyes of Doctor T. J.\nEckleburg kept their vigil, but I perceived, after a moment, that\nother eyes were regarding us with peculiar intensity from less than\ntwenty feet away.\n\nIn one of the windows over the garage the curtains had been moved\naside a little, and Myrtle Wilson was peering down at the car. So\nengrossed was she that she had no consciousness of being observed, and\none emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a\nslowly developing picture. Her expression was curiously familiar—it\nwas an expression I had often seen on women’s faces, but on Myrtle\nWilson’s face it seemed purposeless and inexplicable until I realized\nthat her eyes, wide with jealous terror, were fixed not on Tom, but on\nJordan Baker, whom she took to be his wife.\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nThere is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind, and as we\ndrove away Tom was feeling the hot whips of panic. His wife and his\nmistress, until an hour ago secure and inviolate, were slipping\nprecipitately from his control. Instinct made him step on the\naccelerator with the double purpose of overtaking Daisy and leaving\nWilson behind, and we sped along toward Astoria at fifty miles an\nhour, until, among the spidery girders of the elevated, we came in\nsight of the easygoing blue coupé.\n\n“Those big movies around Fiftieth Street are cool,” suggested\nJordan. “I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone’s away.\nThere’s something very sensuous about it—overripe, as if all sorts of\nfunny fruits were going to fall into your hands.”\n\nThe word “sensuous” had the effect of further disquieting Tom, but\nbefore he could invent a protest the coupé came to a stop, and Daisy\nsignalled us to draw up alongside.\n\n“Where are we going?” she cried.\n\n“How about the movies?”\n\n“It’s so hot,” she complained. “You go. We’ll ride around and meet you\nafter.” With an effort her wit rose faintly. “We’ll meet you on some\ncorner. I’ll be the man smoking two cigarettes.”\n\n“We can’t argue about it here,” Tom said impatiently, as a truck gave\nout a cursing whistle behind us. “You follow me to the south side of\nCentral Park, in front of the Plaza.”\n\nSeveral times he turned his head and looked back for their car, and if\nthe traffic delayed them he slowed up until they came into sight. I\nthink he was afraid they would dart down a side-street and out of his\nlife forever.\n\nBut they didn’t. And we all took the less explicable step of engaging\nthe parlour of a suite in the Plaza Hotel.\n\nThe prolonged and tumultuous argument that ended by herding us into\nthat room eludes me, though I have a sharp physical memory that, in\nthe course of it, my underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around\nmy legs and intermittent beads of sweat raced cool across my back.\nThe notion originated with Daisy’s suggestion that we hire five\nbathrooms and take cold baths, and then assumed more tangible form as\n“a place to have a mint julep.” Each of us said over and over that it\nwas a “crazy idea”—we all talked at once to a baffled clerk and\nthought, or pretended to think, that we were being very funny …\n\nThe room was large and stifling, and, though it was already four\no’clock, opening the windows admitted only a gust of hot shrubbery\nfrom the Park. Daisy went to the mirror and stood with her back to us,\nfixing her hair.\n\n“It’s a swell suite,” whispered Jordan respectfully, and everyone\nlaughed.\n\n“Open another window,” commanded Daisy, without turning around.\n\n“There aren’t any more.”\n\n“Well, we’d better telephone for an axe—”\n\n“The thing to do is to forget about the heat,” said Tom impatiently.\n“You make it ten times worse by crabbing about it.”\n\nHe unrolled the bottle of whisky from the towel and put it on the\ntable.\n\n“Why not let her alone, old sport?” remarked Gatsby. “You’re the one\nthat wanted to come to town.”\n\nThere was a moment of silence. The telephone book slipped from its\nnail and splashed to the floor, whereupon Jordan whispered, “Excuse\nme”—but this time no one laughed.\n\n“I’ll pick it up,” I offered.\n\n“I’ve got it.” Gatsby examined the parted string, muttered “Hum!” in\nan interested way, and tossed the book on a chair.\n\n“That’s a great expression of yours, isn’t it?” said Tom sharply.\n\n“What is?”\n\n“All this ‘old sport’ business. Where’d you pick that up?”\n\n“Now see here, Tom,” said Daisy, turning around from the mirror, “if\nyou’re going to make personal remarks I won’t stay here a minute.\nCall up and order some ice for the mint julep.”\n\nAs Tom took up the receiver the compressed heat exploded into sound\nand we were listening to the portentous chords of Mendelssohn’s\nWedding March from the ballroom below.\n\n“Imagine marrying anybody in this heat!” cried Jordan dismally.\n\n“Still—I was married in the middle of June,” Daisy remembered.\n“Louisville in June! Somebody fainted. Who was it fainted, Tom?”\n\n“Biloxi,” he answered shortly.\n\n“A man named Biloxi. ‘Blocks’ Biloxi, and he made boxes—that’s a\nfact—and he was from Biloxi, Tennessee.”\n\n“They carried him into my house,” appended Jordan, “because we lived\njust two doors from the church. And he stayed three weeks, until Daddy\ntold him he had to get out. The day after he left Daddy died.”  After\na moment she added. “There wasn’t any connection.”\n\n“I used to know a Bill Biloxi from Memphis,” I remarked.\n\n“That was his cousin. I knew his whole family history before he\nleft. He gave me an aluminium putter that I use today.”\n\nThe music had died down as the ceremony began and now a long cheer\nfloated in at the window, followed by intermittent cries of\n“Yea—ea—ea!” and finally by a burst of jazz as the dancing began.\n\n“We’re getting old,” said Daisy. “If we were young we’d rise and\ndance.”\n\n“Remember Biloxi,” Jordan warned her. “Where’d you know him, Tom?”\n\n“Biloxi?” He concentrated with an effort. “I didn’t know him. He was a\nfriend of Daisy’s.”\n\n“He was not,” she denied. “I’d never seen him before. He came down in\nthe private car.”\n\n“Well, he said he knew you. He said he was raised in Louisville. Asa\nBird brought him around at the last minute and asked if we had room\nfor him.”\n\nJordan smiled.\n\n“He was probably bumming his way home. He told me he was president of\nyour class at Yale.”\n\nTom and I looked at each other blankly.\n\n“Biloxi?”\n\n“First place, we didn’t have any president—”\n\nGatsby’s foot beat a short, restless tattoo and Tom eyed him suddenly.\n\n“By the way, Mr. Gatsby, I understand you’re an Oxford man.”\n\n“Not exactly.”\n\n“Oh, yes, I understand you went to Oxford.”\n\n“Yes—I went there.”\n\nA pause. Then Tom’s voice, incredulous and insulting:\n\n“You must have gone there about the time Biloxi went to New Haven.”\n\nAnother pause. A waiter knocked and came in with crushed mint and ice\nbut the silence was unbroken by his “thank you” and the soft closing\nof the door. This tremendous detail was to be cleared up at last.\n\n“I told you I went there,” said Gatsby.\n\n“I heard you, but I’d like to know when.”\n\n“It was in nineteen-nineteen, I only stayed five months. That’s why I\ncan’t really call myself an Oxford man.”\n\nTom glanced around to see if we mirrored his unbelief. But we were all\nlooking at Gatsby.\n\n“It was an opportunity they gave to some of the officers after the\narmistice,” he continued. “We could go to any of the universities in\nEngland or France.”\n\nI wanted to get up and slap him on the back. I had one of those\nrenewals of complete faith in him that I’d experienced before.\n\nDaisy rose, smiling faintly, and went to the table.\n\n“Open the whisky, Tom,” she ordered, “and I’ll make you a mint julep.\nThen you won’t seem so stupid to yourself … Look at the mint!”\n\n“Wait a minute,” snapped Tom, “I want to ask Mr. Gatsby one more\nquestion.”\n\n“Go on,” Gatsby said politely.\n\n“What kind of a row are you trying to cause in my house anyhow?”\n\nThey were out in the open at last and Gatsby was content.\n\n“He isn’t causing a row,” Daisy looked desperately from one to the\nother. “You’re causing a row. Please have a little self-control.”\n\n“Self-control!” repeated Tom incredulously. “I suppose the latest\nthing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your\nwife. Well, if that’s the idea you can count me out … Nowadays people\nbegin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next\nthey’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between\nblack and white.”\n\nFlushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone\non the last barrier of civilization.\n\n“We’re all white here,” murmured Jordan.\n\n“I know I’m not very popular. I don’t give big parties. I suppose\nyou’ve got to make your house into a pigsty in order to have any\nfriends—in the modern world.”\n\nAngry as I was, as we all were, I was tempted to laugh whenever he\nopened his mouth. The transition from libertine to prig was so\ncomplete.\n\n“I’ve got something to tell you, old sport—” began Gatsby. But Daisy\nguessed at his intention.\n\n“Please don’t!” she interrupted helplessly. “Please let’s all go\nhome. Why don’t we all go home?”\n\n“That’s a good idea,” I got up. “Come on, Tom. Nobody wants a drink.”\n\n“I want to know what Mr. Gatsby has to tell me.”\n\n“Your wife doesn’t love you,” said Gatsby. “She’s never loved you.\nShe loves me.”\n\n“You must be crazy!” exclaimed Tom automatically.\n\nGatsby sprang to his feet, vivid with excitement.\n\n“She never loved you, do you hear?” he cried. “She only married you\nbecause I was poor and she was tired of waiting for me. It was a\nterrible mistake, but in her heart she never loved anyone except me!”\n\nAt this point Jordan and I tried to go, but Tom and Gatsby insisted\nwith competitive firmness that we remain—as though neither of them had\nanything to conceal and it would be a privilege to partake vicariously\nof their emotions.\n\n“Sit down, Daisy,” Tom’s voice groped unsuccessfully for the paternal\nnote. “What’s been going on? I want to hear all about it.”\n\n“I told you what’s been going on,” said Gatsby. “Going on for five\nyears—and you didn’t know.”\n\nTom turned to Daisy sharply.\n\n“You’ve been seeing this fellow for five years?”\n\n“Not seeing,” said Gatsby. “No, we couldn’t meet. But both of us loved\neach other all that time, old sport, and you didn’t know. I used to\nlaugh sometimes”—but there was no laughter in his eyes—“to think that\nyou didn’t know.”\n\n“Oh—that’s all.” Tom tapped his thick fingers together like a\nclergyman and leaned back in his chair.\n\n“You’re crazy!” he exploded. “I can’t speak about what happened five\nyears ago, because I didn’t know Daisy then—and I’ll be damned if I\nsee how you got within a mile of her unless you brought the groceries\nto the back door. But all the rest of that’s a God damned lie. Daisy\nloved me when she married me and she loves me now.”\n\n“No,” said Gatsby, shaking his head.\n\n“She does, though. The trouble is that sometimes she gets foolish\nideas in her head and doesn’t know what she’s doing.” He nodded\nsagely. “And what’s more, I love Daisy too. Once in a while I go off\non a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in\nmy heart I love her all the time.”\n\n“You’re revolting,” said Daisy. She turned to me, and her voice,\ndropping an octave lower, filled the room with thrilling scorn: “Do\nyou know why we left Chicago? I’m surprised that they didn’t treat you\nto the story of that little spree.”\n\nGatsby walked over and stood beside her.\n\n“Daisy, that’s all over now,” he said earnestly. “It doesn’t matter\nany more. Just tell him the truth—that you never loved him—and it’s\nall wiped out forever.”\n\nShe looked at him blindly. “Why—how could I love him—possibly?”\n\n“You never loved him.”\n\nShe hesitated. Her eyes fell on Jordan and me with a sort of appeal,\nas though she realized at last what she was doing—and as though she\nhad never, all along, intended doing anything at all. But it was done\nnow. It was too late.\n\n“I never loved him,” she said, with perceptible reluctance.\n\n“Not at Kapiolani?” demanded Tom suddenly.\n\n“No.”\n\nFrom the ballroom beneath, muffled and suffocating chords were\ndrifting up on hot waves of air.\n\n“Not that day I carried you down from the Punch Bowl to keep your\nshoes dry?” There was a husky tenderness in his tone … “Daisy?”\n\n“Please don’t.” Her voice was cold, but the rancour was gone from it.\nShe looked at Gatsby. “There, Jay,” she said—but her hand as she tried\nto light a cigarette was trembling. Suddenly she threw the cigarette\nand the burning match on the carpet.\n\n“Oh, you want too much!” she cried to Gatsby. “I love you now—isn’t\nthat enough? I can’t help what’s past.” She began to sob\nhelplessly. “I did love him once—but I loved you too.”\n\nGatsby’s eyes opened and closed.\n\n“You loved me too?” he repeated.\n\n“Even that’s a lie,” said Tom savagely. “She didn’t know you were\nalive. Why—there’s things between Daisy and me that you’ll never know,\nthings that neither of us can ever forget.”\n\nThe words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.\n\n“I want to speak to Daisy alone,” he insisted. “She’s all excited\nnow—”\n\n“Even alone I can’t say I never loved Tom,” she admitted in a pitiful\nvoice. “It wouldn’t be true.”\n\n“Of course it wouldn’t,” agreed Tom.\n\nShe turned to her husband.\n\n“As if it mattered to you,” she said.\n\n“Of course it matters. I’m going to take better care of you from now\non.”\n\n“You don’t understand,” said Gatsby, with a touch of panic. “You’re\nnot going to take care of her any more.”\n\n“I’m not?” Tom opened his eyes wide and laughed. He could afford to\ncontrol himself now. “Why’s that?”\n\n“Daisy’s leaving you.”\n\n“Nonsense.”\n\n“I am, though,” she said with a visible effort.\n\n“She’s not leaving me!” Tom’s words suddenly leaned down over Gatsby.\n“Certainly not for a common swindler who’d have to steal the ring he\nput on her finger.”\n\n“I won’t stand this!” cried Daisy. “Oh, please let’s get out.”\n\n“Who are you, anyhow?” broke out Tom. “You’re one of that bunch that\nhangs around with Meyer Wolfshiem—that much I happen to know. I’ve\nmade a little investigation into your affairs—and I’ll carry it\nfurther tomorrow.”\n\n“You can suit yourself about that, old sport,” said Gatsby steadily.\n\n“I found out what your ‘drugstores’ were.” He turned to us and spoke\nrapidly. “He and this Wolfshiem bought up a lot of side-street\ndrugstores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the\ncounter. That’s one of his little stunts. I picked him for a\nbootlegger the first time I saw him, and I wasn’t far wrong.”\n\n“What about it?” said Gatsby politely. “I guess your friend Walter\nChase wasn’t too proud to come in on it.”\n\n“And you left him in the lurch, didn’t you? You let him go to jail for\na month over in New Jersey. God! You ought to hear Walter on the\nsubject of you.”\n\n“He came to us dead broke. He was very glad to pick up some money, old\nsport.”\n\n“Don’t you call me ‘old sport’!” cried Tom. Gatsby said\nnothing. “Walter could have you up on the betting laws too, but\nWolfshiem scared him into shutting his mouth.”\n\nThat unfamiliar yet recognizable look was back again in Gatsby’s face.\n\n“That drugstore business was just small change,” continued Tom slowly,\n“but you’ve got something on now that Walter’s afraid to tell me\nabout.”\n\nI glanced at Daisy, who was staring terrified between Gatsby and her\nhusband, and at Jordan, who had begun to balance an invisible but\nabsorbing object on the tip of her chin. Then I turned back to\nGatsby—and was startled at his expression. He looked—and this is said\nin all contempt for the babbled slander of his garden—as if he had\n“killed a man.” For a moment the set of his face could be described in\njust that fantastic way.\n\nIt passed, and he began to talk excitedly to Daisy, denying\neverything, defending his name against accusations that had not been\nmade. But with every word she was drawing further and further into\nherself, so he gave that up, and only the dead dream fought on as the\nafternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible,\nstruggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across\nthe room.\n\nThe voice begged again to go.\n\n“Please, Tom! I can’t stand this any more.”\n\nHer frightened eyes told that whatever intentions, whatever courage\nshe had had, were definitely gone.\n\n“You two start on home, Daisy,” said Tom. “In Mr. Gatsby’s car.”\n\nShe looked at Tom, alarmed now, but he insisted with magnanimous\nscorn.\n\n“Go on. He won’t annoy you. I think he realizes that his presumptuous\nlittle flirtation is over.”\n\nThey were gone, without a word, snapped out, made accidental,\nisolated, like ghosts, even from our pity.\n\nAfter a moment Tom got up and began wrapping the unopened bottle of\nwhisky in the towel.\n\n“Want any of this stuff? Jordan? … Nick?”\n\nI didn’t answer.\n\n“Nick?” He asked again.\n\n“What?”\n\n“Want any?”\n\n“No … I just remembered that today’s my birthday.”\n\nI was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a\nnew decade.\n\nIt was seven o’clock when we got into the coupé with him and started\nfor Long Island. Tom talked incessantly, exulting and laughing, but\nhis voice was as remote from Jordan and me as the foreign clamour on\nthe sidewalk or the tumult of the elevated overhead. Human sympathy\nhas its limits, and we were content to let all their tragic arguments\nfade with the city lights behind. Thirty—the promise of a decade of\nloneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning\nbriefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside\nme, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten\ndreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face\nfell lazily against my coat’s shoulder and the formidable stroke of\nthirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.\n\nSo we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nThe young Greek, Michaelis, who ran the coffee joint beside the\nash-heaps was the principal witness at the inquest. He had slept\nthrough the heat until after five, when he strolled over to the\ngarage, and found George Wilson sick in his office—really sick, pale\nas his own pale hair and shaking all over. Michaelis advised him to go\nto bed, but Wilson refused, saying that he’d miss a lot of business if\nhe did. While his neighbour was trying to persuade him a violent\nracket broke out overhead.\n\n“I’ve got my wife locked in up there,” explained Wilson calmly.\n“She’s going to stay there till the day after tomorrow, and then we’re\ngoing to move away.”\n\nMichaelis was astonished; they had been neighbours for four years, and\nWilson had never seemed faintly capable of such a statement.\nGenerally he was one of these worn-out men: when he wasn’t working, he\nsat on a chair in the doorway and stared at the people and the cars\nthat passed along the road. When anyone spoke to him he invariably\nlaughed in an agreeable, colourless way. He was his wife’s man and not\nhis own.\n\nSo naturally Michaelis tried to find out what had happened, but Wilson\nwouldn’t say a word—instead he began to throw curious, suspicious\nglances at his visitor and ask him what he’d been doing at certain\ntimes on certain days. Just as the latter was getting uneasy, some\nworkmen came past the door bound for his restaurant, and Michaelis\ntook the opportunity to get away, intending to come back later. But he\ndidn’t. He supposed he forgot to, that’s all. When he came outside\nagain, a little after seven, he was reminded of the conversation\nbecause he heard Mrs. Wilson’s voice, loud and scolding, downstairs in\nthe garage.\n\n“Beat me!” he heard her cry. “Throw me down and beat me, you dirty\nlittle coward!”\n\nA moment later she rushed out into the dusk, waving her hands and\nshouting—before he could move from his door the business was over.\n\nThe “death car” as the newspapers called it, didn’t stop; it came out\nof the gathering darkness, wavered tragically for a moment, and then\ndisappeared around the next bend. Mavro Michaelis wasn’t even sure of\nits colour—he told the first policeman that it was light green. The\nother car, the one going toward New York, came to rest a hundred yards\nbeyond, and its driver hurried back to where Myrtle Wilson, her life\nviolently extinguished, knelt in the road and mingled her thick dark\nblood with the dust.\n\nMichaelis and this man reached her first, but when they had torn open\nher shirtwaist, still damp with perspiration, they saw that her left\nbreast was swinging loose like a flap, and there was no need to listen\nfor the heart beneath. The mouth was wide open and ripped a little at\nthe corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the\ntremendous vitality she had stored so long.\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nWe saw the three or four automobiles and the crowd when we were still\nsome distance away.\n\n“Wreck!” said Tom. “That’s good. Wilson’ll have a little business at\nlast.”\n\nHe slowed down, but still without any intention of stopping, until, as\nwe came nearer, the hushed, intent faces of the people at the garage\ndoor made him automatically put on the brakes.\n\n“We’ll take a look,” he said doubtfully, “just a look.”\n\nI became aware now of a hollow, wailing sound which issued incessantly\nfrom the garage, a sound which as we got out of the coupé and walked\ntoward the door resolved itself into the words “Oh, my God!” uttered\nover and over in a gasping moan.\n\n“There’s some bad trouble here,” said Tom excitedly.\n\nHe reached up on tiptoes and peered over a circle of heads into the\ngarage, which was lit only by a yellow light in a swinging metal\nbasket overhead. Then he made a harsh sound in his throat, and with a\nviolent thrusting movement of his powerful arms pushed his way\nthrough.\n\nThe circle closed up again with a running murmur of expostulation; it\nwas a minute before I could see anything at all. Then new arrivals\nderanged the line, and Jordan and I were pushed suddenly inside.\n\nMyrtle Wilson’s body, wrapped in a blanket, and then in another\nblanket, as though she suffered from a chill in the hot night, lay on\na worktable by the wall, and Tom, with his back to us, was bending\nover it, motionless. Next to him stood a motorcycle policeman taking\ndown names with much sweat and correction in a little book. At first I\ncouldn’t find the source of the high, groaning words that echoed\nclamorously through the bare garage—then I saw Wilson standing on the\nraised threshold of his office, swaying back and forth and holding to\nthe doorposts with both hands. Some man was talking to him in a low\nvoice and attempting, from time to time, to lay a hand on his\nshoulder, but Wilson neither heard nor saw. His eyes would drop slowly\nfrom the swinging light to the laden table by the wall, and then jerk\nback to the light again, and he gave out incessantly his high,\nhorrible call:\n\n“Oh, my Ga-od! Oh, my Ga-od! Oh, Ga-od! Oh, my Ga-od!”\n\nPresently Tom lifted his head with a jerk and, after staring around\nthe garage with glazed eyes, addressed a mumbled incoherent remark to\nthe policeman.\n\n“M-a-v—” the policeman was saying, “—o—”\n\n“No, r—” corrected the man, “M-a-v-r-o—”\n\n“Listen to me!” muttered Tom fiercely.\n\n“r—” said the policeman, “o—”\n\n“g—”\n\n“g—” He looked up as Tom’s broad hand fell sharply on his shoulder.\n“What you want, fella?”\n\n“What happened?—that’s what I want to know.”\n\n“Auto hit her. Ins’antly killed.”\n\n“Instantly killed,” repeated Tom, staring.\n\n“She ran out ina road. Son-of-a-bitch didn’t even stopus car.”\n\n“There was two cars,” said Michaelis, “one comin’, one goin’, see?”\n\n“Going where?” asked the policeman keenly.\n\n“One goin’ each way. Well, she”—his hand rose toward the blankets but\nstopped halfway and fell to his side—“she ran out there an’ the one\ncomin’ from N’York knock right into her, goin’ thirty or forty miles\nan hour.”\n\n“What’s the name of this place here?” demanded the officer.\n\n“Hasn’t got any name.”\n\nA pale well-dressed negro stepped near.\n\n“It was a yellow car,” he said, “big yellow car. New.”\n\n“See the accident?” asked the policeman.\n\n“No, but the car passed me down the road, going faster’n forty. Going\nfifty, sixty.”\n\n“Come here and let’s have your name. Look out now. I want to get his\nname.”\n\nSome words of this conversation must have reached Wilson, swaying in\nthe office door, for suddenly a new theme found voice among his\ngrasping cries:\n\n“You don’t have to tell me what kind of car it was! I know what kind\nof car it was!”\n\nWatching Tom, I saw the wad of muscle back of his shoulder tighten\nunder his coat. He walked quickly over to Wilson and, standing in\nfront of him, seized him firmly by the upper arms.\n\n“You’ve got to pull yourself together,” he said with soothing\ngruffness.\n\nWilson’s eyes fell upon Tom; he started up on his tiptoes and then\nwould have collapsed to his knees had not Tom held him upright.\n\n“Listen,” said Tom, shaking him a little. “I just got here a minute\nago, from New York. I was bringing you that coupé we’ve been talking\nabout. That yellow car I was driving this afternoon wasn’t mine—do you\nhear? I haven’t seen it all afternoon.”\n\nOnly the negro and I were near enough to hear what he said, but the\npoliceman caught something in the tone and looked over with truculent\neyes.\n\n“What’s all that?” he demanded.\n\n“I’m a friend of his.” Tom turned his head but kept his hands firm on\nWilson’s body. “He says he knows the car that did it … It was a yellow\ncar.”\n\nSome dim impulse moved the policeman to look suspiciously at Tom.\n\n“And what colour’s your car?”\n\n“It’s a blue car, a coupé.”\n\n“We’ve come straight from New York,” I said.\n\nSomeone who had been driving a little behind us confirmed this, and\nthe policeman turned away.\n\n“Now, if you’ll let me have that name again correct—”\n\nPicking up Wilson like a doll, Tom carried him into the office, set\nhim down in a chair, and came back.\n\n“If somebody’ll come here and sit with him,” he snapped\nauthoritatively. He watched while the two men standing closest glanced\nat each other and went unwillingly into the room. Then Tom shut the\ndoor on them and came down the single step, his eyes avoiding the\ntable. As he passed close to me he whispered: “Let’s get out.”\n\nSelf-consciously, with his authoritative arms breaking the way, we\npushed through the still gathering crowd, passing a hurried doctor,\ncase in hand, who had been sent for in wild hope half an hour ago.\n\nTom drove slowly until we were beyond the bend—then his foot came down\nhard, and the coupé raced along through the night. In a little while I\nheard a low husky sob, and saw that the tears were overflowing down\nhis face.\n\n“The God damned coward!” he whimpered. “He didn’t even stop his car.”\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nThe Buchanans’ house floated suddenly toward us through the dark\nrustling trees. Tom stopped beside the porch and looked up at the\nsecond floor, where two windows bloomed with light among the vines.\n\n“Daisy’s home,” he said. As we got out of the car he glanced at me and\nfrowned slightly.\n\n“I ought to have dropped you in West Egg, Nick. There’s nothing we can\ndo tonight.”\n\nA change had come over him, and he spoke gravely, and with decision.\nAs we walked across the moonlight gravel to the porch he disposed of\nthe situation in a few brisk phrases.\n\n“I’ll telephone for a taxi to take you home, and while you’re waiting\nyou and Jordan better go in the kitchen and have them get you some\nsupper—if you want any.” He opened the door. “Come in.”\n\n“No, thanks. But I’d be glad if you’d order me the taxi. I’ll wait\noutside.”\n\nJordan put her hand on my arm.\n\n“Won’t you come in, Nick?”\n\n“No, thanks.”\n\nI was feeling a little sick and I wanted to be alone. But Jordan\nlingered for a moment more.\n\n“It’s only half-past nine,” she said.\n\nI’d be damned if I’d go in; I’d had enough of all of them for one day,\nand suddenly that included Jordan too. She must have seen something of\nthis in my expression, for she turned abruptly away and ran up the\nporch steps into the house. I sat down for a few minutes with my head\nin my hands, until I heard the phone taken up inside and the butler’s\nvoice calling a taxi. Then I walked slowly down the drive away from\nthe house, intending to wait by the gate.\n\nI hadn’t gone twenty yards when I heard my name and Gatsby stepped\nfrom between two bushes into the path. I must have felt pretty weird\nby that time, because I could think of nothing except the luminosity\nof his pink suit under the moon.\n\n“What are you doing?” I inquired.\n\n“Just standing here, old sport.”\n\nSomehow, that seemed a despicable occupation. For all I knew he was\ngoing to rob the house in a moment; I wouldn’t have been surprised to\nsee sinister faces, the faces of “Wolfshiem’s people,” behind him in\nthe dark shrubbery.\n\n“Did you see any trouble on the road?” he asked after a minute.\n\n“Yes.”\n\nHe hesitated.\n\n“Was she killed?”\n\n“Yes.”\n\n“I thought so; I told Daisy I thought so. It’s better that the shock\nshould all come at once. She stood it pretty well.”\n\nHe spoke as if Daisy’s reaction was the only thing that mattered.\n\n“I got to West Egg by a side road,” he went on, “and left the car in\nmy garage. I don’t think anybody saw us, but of course I can’t be\nsure.”\n\nI disliked him so much by this time that I didn’t find it necessary to\ntell him he was wrong.\n\n“Who was the woman?” he inquired.\n\n“Her name was Wilson. Her husband owns the garage. How the devil did\nit happen?”\n\n“Well, I tried to swing the wheel—” He broke off, and suddenly I\nguessed at the truth.\n\n“Was Daisy driving?”\n\n“Yes,” he said after a moment, “but of course I’ll say I was. You see,\nwhen we left New York she was very nervous and she thought it would\nsteady her to drive—and this woman rushed out at us just as we were\npassing a car coming the other way. It all happened in a minute, but\nit seemed to me that she wanted to speak to us, thought we were\nsomebody she knew. Well, first Daisy turned away from the woman toward\nthe other car, and then she lost her nerve and turned back. The second\nmy hand reached the wheel I felt the shock—it must have killed her\ninstantly.”\n\n“It ripped her open—”\n\n“Don’t tell me, old sport.” He winced. “Anyhow—Daisy stepped on it. I\ntried to make her stop, but she couldn’t, so I pulled on the emergency\nbrake. Then she fell over into my lap and I drove on.\n\n“She’ll be all right tomorrow,” he said presently. “I’m just going to\nwait here and see if he tries to bother her about that unpleasantness\nthis afternoon. She’s locked herself into her room, and if he tries\nany brutality she’s going to turn the light out and on again.”\n\n“He won’t touch her,” I said. “He’s not thinking about her.”\n\n“I don’t trust him, old sport.”\n\n“How long are you going to wait?”\n\n“All night, if necessary. Anyhow, till they all go to bed.”\n\nA new point of view occurred to me. Suppose Tom found out that Daisy\nhad been driving. He might think he saw a connection in it—he might\nthink anything. I looked at the house; there were two or three bright\nwindows downstairs and the pink glow from Daisy’s room on the ground\nfloor.\n\n“You wait here,” I said. “I’ll see if there’s any sign of a\ncommotion.”\n\nI walked back along the border of the lawn, traversed the gravel\nsoftly, and tiptoed up the veranda steps. The drawing-room curtains\nwere open, and I saw that the room was empty. Crossing the porch where\nwe had dined that June night three months before, I came to a small\nrectangle of light which I guessed was the pantry window. The blind\nwas drawn, but I found a rift at the sill.\n\nDaisy and Tom were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table,\nwith a plate of cold fried chicken between them, and two bottles of\nale. He was talking intently across the table at her, and in his\nearnestness his hand had fallen upon and covered her own. Once in a\nwhile she looked up at him and nodded in agreement.\n\nThey weren’t happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the\nale—and yet they weren’t unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air\nof natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said\nthat they were conspiring together.\n\nAs I tiptoed from the porch I heard my taxi feeling its way along the\ndark road toward the house. Gatsby was waiting where I had left him in\nthe drive.\n\n“Is it all quiet up there?” he asked anxiously.\n\n“Yes, it’s all quiet.” I hesitated. “You’d better come home and get\nsome sleep.”\n\nHe shook his head.\n\n“I want to wait here till Daisy goes to bed. Good night, old sport.”\n\nHe put his hands in his coat pockets and turned back eagerly to his\nscrutiny of the house, as though my presence marred the sacredness of\nthe vigil. So I walked away and left him standing there in the\nmoonlight—watching over nothing.\n\n\n                                 VIII\n\nI couldn’t sleep all night; a foghorn was groaning incessantly on the\nSound, and I tossed half-sick between grotesque reality and savage,\nfrightening dreams. Toward dawn I heard a taxi go up Gatsby’s drive,\nand immediately I jumped out of bed and began to dress—I felt that I\nhad something to tell him, something to warn him about, and morning\nwould be too late.\n\nCrossing his lawn, I saw that his front door was still open and he was\nleaning against a table in the hall, heavy with dejection or sleep.\n\n“Nothing happened,” he said wanly. “I waited, and about four o’clock\nshe came to the window and stood there for a minute and then turned\nout the light.”\n\nHis house had never seemed so enormous to me as it did that night when\nwe hunted through the great rooms for cigarettes. We pushed aside\ncurtains that were like pavilions, and felt over innumerable feet of\ndark wall for electric light switches—once I tumbled with a sort of\nsplash upon the keys of a ghostly piano. There was an inexplicable\namount of dust everywhere, and the rooms were musty, as though they\nhadn’t been aired for many days. I found the humidor on an unfamiliar\ntable, with two stale, dry cigarettes inside. Throwing open the French\nwindows of the drawing-room, we sat smoking out into the darkness.\n\n“You ought to go away,” I said. “It’s pretty certain they’ll trace\nyour car.”\n\n“Go away now, old sport?”\n\n“Go to Atlantic City for a week, or up to Montreal.”\n\nHe wouldn’t consider it. He couldn’t possibly leave Daisy until he\nknew what she was going to do. He was clutching at some last hope and\nI couldn’t bear to shake him free.\n\nIt was this night that he told me the strange story of his youth with\nDan Cody—told it to me because “Jay Gatsby” had broken up like glass\nagainst Tom’s hard malice, and the long secret extravaganza was played\nout. I think that he would have acknowledged anything now, without\nreserve, but he wanted to talk about Daisy.\n\nShe was the first “nice” girl he had ever known. In various unrevealed\ncapacities he had come in contact with such people, but always with\nindiscernible barbed wire between. He found her excitingly\ndesirable. He went to her house, at first with other officers from\nCamp Taylor, then alone. It amazed him—he had never been in such a\nbeautiful house before. But what gave it an air of breathless\nintensity, was that Daisy lived there—it was as casual a thing to her\nas his tent out at camp was to him. There was a ripe mystery about it,\na hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other\nbedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its\ncorridors, and of romances that were not musty and laid away already\nin lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year’s\nshining motorcars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely\nwithered. It excited him, too, that many men had already loved\nDaisy—it increased her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all\nabout the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still\nvibrant emotions.\n\nBut he knew that he was in Daisy’s house by a colossal\naccident. However glorious might be his future as Jay Gatsby, he was\nat present a penniless young man without a past, and at any moment the\ninvisible cloak of his uniform might slip from his shoulders. So he\nmade the most of his time. He took what he could get, ravenously and\nunscrupulously—eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took\nher because he had no real right to touch her hand.\n\nHe might have despised himself, for he had certainly taken her under\nfalse pretences. I don’t mean that he had traded on his phantom\nmillions, but he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he\nlet her believe that he was a person from much the same strata as\nherself—that he was fully able to take care of her. As a matter of\nfact, he had no such facilities—he had no comfortable family standing\nbehind him, and he was liable at the whim of an impersonal government\nto be blown anywhere about the world.\n\nBut he didn’t despise himself and it didn’t turn out as he had\nimagined. He had intended, probably, to take what he could and go—but\nnow he found that he had committed himself to the following of a\ngrail. He knew that Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn’t realize\njust how extraordinary a “nice” girl could be. She vanished into her\nrich house, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby—nothing. He felt\nmarried to her, that was all.\n\nWhen they met again, two days later, it was Gatsby who was breathless,\nwho was, somehow, betrayed. Her porch was bright with the bought\nluxury of star-shine; the wicker of the settee squeaked fashionably as\nshe turned toward him and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth. She\nhad caught a cold, and it made her voice huskier and more charming\nthan ever, and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and\nmystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many\nclothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the\nhot struggles of the poor.\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\n“I can’t describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her,\nold sport. I even hoped for a while that she’d throw me over, but she\ndidn’t, because she was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot\nbecause I knew different things from her … Well, there I was, way off\nmy ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden\nI didn’t care. What was the use of doing great things if I could have\na better time telling her what I was going to do?”\n\nOn the last afternoon before he went abroad, he sat with Daisy in his\narms for a long, silent time. It was a cold fall day, with fire in the\nroom and her cheeks flushed. Now and then she moved and he changed his\narm a little, and once he kissed her dark shining hair. The afternoon\nhad made them tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deep memory\nfor the long parting the next day promised. They had never been closer\nin their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with\nanother, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat’s shoulder\nor when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were\nasleep.\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nHe did extraordinarily well in the war. He was a captain before he\nwent to the front, and following the Argonne battles he got his\nmajority and the command of the divisional machine-guns. After the\narmistice he tried frantically to get home, but some complication or\nmisunderstanding sent him to Oxford instead. He was worried now—there\nwas a quality of nervous despair in Daisy’s letters. She didn’t see\nwhy he couldn’t come. She was feeling the pressure of the world\noutside, and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her\nand be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.\n\nFor Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids\nand pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of\nthe year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new\ntunes. All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the\n“Beale Street Blues” while a hundred pairs of golden and silver\nslippers shuffled the shining dust. At the grey tea hour there were\nalways rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever,\nwhile fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the\nsad horns around the floor.\n\nThrough this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the\nseason; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with\nhalf a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and\nchiffon of an evening-dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor\nbeside her bed. And all the time something within her was crying for a\ndecision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately—and the decision\nmust be made by some force—of love, of money, of unquestionable\npracticality—that was close at hand.\n\nThat force took shape in the middle of spring with the arrival of Tom\nBuchanan. There was a wholesome bulkiness about his person and his\nposition, and Daisy was flattered. Doubtless there was a certain\nstruggle and a certain relief. The letter reached Gatsby while he was\nstill at Oxford.\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nIt was dawn now on Long Island and we went about opening the rest of\nthe windows downstairs, filling the house with grey-turning,\ngold-turning light. The shadow of a tree fell abruptly across the dew\nand ghostly birds began to sing among the blue leaves. There was a\nslow, pleasant movement in the air, scarcely a wind, promising a cool,\nlovely day.\n\n“I don’t think she ever loved him.” Gatsby turned around from a window\nand looked at me challengingly. “You must remember, old sport, she was\nvery excited this afternoon. He told her those things in a way that\nfrightened her—that made it look as if I was some kind of cheap\nsharper. And the result was she hardly knew what she was saying.”\n\nHe sat down gloomily.\n\n“Of course she might have loved him just for a minute, when they were\nfirst married—and loved me more even then, do you see?”\n\nSuddenly he came out with a curious remark.\n\n“In any case,” he said, “it was just personal.”\n\nWhat could you make of that, except to suspect some intensity in his\nconception of the affair that couldn’t be measured?\n\nHe came back from France when Tom and Daisy were still on their\nwedding trip, and made a miserable but irresistible journey to\nLouisville on the last of his army pay. He stayed there a week,\nwalking the streets where their footsteps had clicked together through\nthe November night and revisiting the out-of-the-way places to which\nthey had driven in her white car. Just as Daisy’s house had always\nseemed to him more mysterious and gay than other houses, so his idea\nof the city itself, even though she was gone from it, was pervaded\nwith a melancholy beauty.\n\nHe left feeling that if he had searched harder, he might have found\nher—that he was leaving her behind. The day-coach—he was penniless\nnow—was hot. He went out to the open vestibule and sat down on a\nfolding-chair, and the station slid away and the backs of unfamiliar\nbuildings moved by. Then out into the spring fields, where a yellow\ntrolley raced them for a minute with people in it who might once have\nseen the pale magic of her face along the casual street.\n\nThe track curved and now it was going away from the sun, which, as it\nsank lower, seemed to spread itself in benediction over the vanishing\ncity where she had drawn her breath. He stretched out his hand\ndesperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of\nthe spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too\nfast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part\nof it, the freshest and the best, forever.\n\nIt was nine o’clock when we finished breakfast and went out on the\nporch. The night had made a sharp difference in the weather and there\nwas an autumn flavour in the air. The gardener, the last one of\nGatsby’s former servants, came to the foot of the steps.\n\n“I’m going to drain the pool today, Mr. Gatsby. Leaves’ll start\nfalling pretty soon, and then there’s always trouble with the pipes.”\n\n“Don’t do it today,” Gatsby answered. He turned to me apologetically.\n“You know, old sport, I’ve never used that pool all summer?”\n\nI looked at my watch and stood up.\n\n“Twelve minutes to my train.”\n\nI didn’t want to go to the city. I wasn’t worth a decent stroke of\nwork, but it was more than that—I didn’t want to leave Gatsby. I\nmissed that train, and then another, before I could get myself away.\n\n“I’ll call you up,” I said finally.\n\n“Do, old sport.”\n\n“I’ll call you about noon.”\n\nWe walked slowly down the steps.\n\n“I suppose Daisy’ll call too.” He looked at me anxiously, as if he\nhoped I’d corroborate this.\n\n“I suppose so.”\n\n“Well, goodbye.”\n\nWe shook hands and I started away. Just before I reached the hedge I\nremembered something and turned around.\n\n“They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the\nwhole damn bunch put together.”\n\nI’ve always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever\ngave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. First he\nnodded politely, and then his face broke into that radiant and\nunderstanding smile, as if we’d been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact\nall the time. His gorgeous pink rag of a suit made a bright spot of\ncolour against the white steps, and I thought of the night when I\nfirst came to his ancestral home, three months before. The lawn and\ndrive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his\ncorruption—and he had stood on those steps, concealing his\nincorruptible dream, as he waved them goodbye.\n\nI thanked him for his hospitality. We were always thanking him for\nthat—I and the others.\n\n“Goodbye,” I called. “I enjoyed breakfast, Gatsby.”\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nUp in the city, I tried for a while to list the quotations on an\ninterminable amount of stock, then I fell asleep in my swivel-chair.\nJust before noon the phone woke me, and I started up with sweat\nbreaking out on my forehead. It was Jordan Baker; she often called me\nup at this hour because the uncertainty of her own movements between\nhotels and clubs and private houses made her hard to find in any other\nway. Usually her voice came over the wire as something fresh and cool,\nas if a divot from a green golf-links had come sailing in at the\noffice window, but this morning it seemed harsh and dry.\n\n“I’ve left Daisy’s house,” she said. “I’m at Hempstead, and I’m going\ndown to Southampton this afternoon.”\n\nProbably it had been tactful to leave Daisy’s house, but the act\nannoyed me, and her next remark made me rigid.\n\n“You weren’t so nice to me last night.”\n\n“How could it have mattered then?”\n\nSilence for a moment. Then:\n\n“However—I want to see you.”\n\n“I want to see you, too.”\n\n“Suppose I don’t go to Southampton, and come into town this\nafternoon?”\n\n“No—I don’t think this afternoon.”\n\n“Very well.”\n\n“It’s impossible this afternoon. Various—”\n\nWe talked like that for a while, and then abruptly we weren’t talking\nany longer. I don’t know which of us hung up with a sharp click, but I\nknow I didn’t care. I couldn’t have talked to her across a tea-table\nthat day if I never talked to her again in this world.\n\nI called Gatsby’s house a few minutes later, but the line was busy. I\ntried four times; finally an exasperated central told me the wire was\nbeing kept open for long distance from Detroit. Taking out my\ntimetable, I drew a small circle around the three-fifty train. Then I\nleaned back in my chair and tried to think. It was just noon.\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nWhen I passed the ash-heaps on the train that morning I had crossed\ndeliberately to the other side of the car. I supposed there’d be a\ncurious crowd around there all day with little boys searching for dark\nspots in the dust, and some garrulous man telling over and over what\nhad happened, until it became less and less real even to him and he\ncould tell it no longer, and Myrtle Wilson’s tragic achievement was\nforgotten. Now I want to go back a little and tell what happened at\nthe garage after we left there the night before.\n\nThey had difficulty in locating the sister, Catherine. She must have\nbroken her rule against drinking that night, for when she arrived she\nwas stupid with liquor and unable to understand that the ambulance had\nalready gone to Flushing. When they convinced her of this, she\nimmediately fainted, as if that was the intolerable part of the\naffair. Someone, kind or curious, took her in his car and drove her in\nthe wake of her sister’s body.\n\nUntil long after midnight a changing crowd lapped up against the front\nof the garage, while George Wilson rocked himself back and forth on\nthe couch inside. For a while the door of the office was open, and\neveryone who came into the garage glanced irresistibly through it.\nFinally someone said it was a shame, and closed the door. Michaelis\nand several other men were with him; first, four or five men, later\ntwo or three men. Still later Michaelis had to ask the last stranger\nto wait there fifteen minutes longer, while he went back to his own\nplace and made a pot of coffee. After that, he stayed there alone with\nWilson until dawn.\n\nAbout three o’clock the quality of Wilson’s incoherent muttering\nchanged—he grew quieter and began to talk about the yellow car. He\nannounced that he had a way of finding out whom the yellow car\nbelonged to, and then he blurted out that a couple of months ago his\nwife had come from the city with her face bruised and her nose\nswollen.\n\nBut when he heard himself say this, he flinched and began to cry “Oh,\nmy God!” again in his groaning voice. Michaelis made a clumsy attempt\nto distract him.\n\n“How long have you been married, George? Come on there, try and sit\nstill a minute, and answer my question. How long have you been\nmarried?”\n\n“Twelve years.”\n\n“Ever had any children? Come on, George, sit still—I asked you a\nquestion. Did you ever have any children?”\n\nThe hard brown beetles kept thudding against the dull light, and\nwhenever Michaelis heard a car go tearing along the road outside it\nsounded to him like the car that hadn’t stopped a few hours before.\nHe didn’t like to go into the garage, because the work bench was\nstained where the body had been lying, so he moved uncomfortably\naround the office—he knew every object in it before morning—and from\ntime to time sat down beside Wilson trying to keep him more quiet.\n\n“Have you got a church you go to sometimes, George? Maybe even if you\nhaven’t been there for a long time? Maybe I could call up the church\nand get a priest to come over and he could talk to you, see?”\n\n“Don’t belong to any.”\n\n“You ought to have a church, George, for times like this. You must\nhave gone to church once. Didn’t you get married in a church? Listen,\nGeorge, listen to me. Didn’t you get married in a church?”\n\n“That was a long time ago.”\n\nThe effort of answering broke the rhythm of his rocking—for a moment\nhe was silent. Then the same half-knowing, half-bewildered look came\nback into his faded eyes.\n\n“Look in the drawer there,” he said, pointing at the desk.\n\n“Which drawer?”\n\n“That drawer—that one.”\n\nMichaelis opened the drawer nearest his hand. There was nothing in it\nbut a small, expensive dog-leash, made of leather and braided\nsilver. It was apparently new.\n\n“This?” he inquired, holding it up.\n\nWilson stared and nodded.\n\n“I found it yesterday afternoon. She tried to tell me about it, but I\nknew it was something funny.”\n\n“You mean your wife bought it?”\n\n“She had it wrapped in tissue paper on her bureau.”\n\nMichaelis didn’t see anything odd in that, and he gave Wilson a dozen\nreasons why his wife might have bought the dog-leash. But conceivably\nWilson had heard some of these same explanations before, from Myrtle,\nbecause he began saying “Oh, my God!” again in a whisper—his comforter\nleft several explanations in the air.\n\n“Then he killed her,” said Wilson. His mouth dropped open suddenly.\n\n“Who did?”\n\n“I have a way of finding out.”\n\n“You’re morbid, George,” said his friend. “This has been a strain to\nyou and you don’t know what you’re saying. You’d better try and sit\nquiet till morning.”\n\n“He murdered her.”\n\n“It was an accident, George.”\n\nWilson shook his head. His eyes narrowed and his mouth widened\nslightly with the ghost of a superior “Hm!”\n\n“I know,” he said definitely. “I’m one of these trusting fellas and I\ndon’t think any harm to nobody, but when I get to know a thing I know\nit. It was the man in that car. She ran out to speak to him and he\nwouldn’t stop.”\n\nMichaelis had seen this too, but it hadn’t occurred to him that there\nwas any special significance in it. He believed that Mrs. Wilson had\nbeen running away from her husband, rather than trying to stop any\nparticular car.\n\n“How could she of been like that?”\n\n“She’s a deep one,” said Wilson, as if that answered the question.\n“Ah-h-h—”\n\nHe began to rock again, and Michaelis stood twisting the leash in his\nhand.\n\n“Maybe you got some friend that I could telephone for, George?”\n\nThis was a forlorn hope—he was almost sure that Wilson had no friend:\nthere was not enough of him for his wife. He was glad a little later\nwhen he noticed a change in the room, a blue quickening by the window,\nand realized that dawn wasn’t far off. About five o’clock it was blue\nenough outside to snap off the light.\n\nWilson’s glazed eyes turned out to the ash-heaps, where small grey\nclouds took on fantastic shapes and scurried here and there in the\nfaint dawn wind.\n\n“I spoke to her,” he muttered, after a long silence. “I told her she\nmight fool me but she couldn’t fool God. I took her to the\nwindow”—with an effort he got up and walked to the rear window and\nleaned with his face pressed against it—“and I said ‘God knows what\nyou’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but\nyou can’t fool God!’ ”\n\nStanding behind him, Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at\nthe eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, which had just emerged, pale and\nenormous, from the dissolving night.\n\n“God sees everything,” repeated Wilson.\n\n“That’s an advertisement,” Michaelis assured him. Something made him\nturn away from the window and look back into the room. But Wilson\nstood there a long time, his face close to the window pane, nodding\ninto the twilight.\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nBy six o’clock Michaelis was worn out, and grateful for the sound of a\ncar stopping outside. It was one of the watchers of the night before\nwho had promised to come back, so he cooked breakfast for three, which\nhe and the other man ate together. Wilson was quieter now, and\nMichaelis went home to sleep; when he awoke four hours later and\nhurried back to the garage, Wilson was gone.\n\nHis movements—he was on foot all the time—were afterward traced to\nPort Roosevelt and then to Gad’s Hill, where he bought a sandwich that\nhe didn’t eat, and a cup of coffee. He must have been tired and\nwalking slowly, for he didn’t reach Gad’s Hill until noon. Thus far\nthere was no difficulty in accounting for his time—there were boys who\nhad seen a man “acting sort of crazy,” and motorists at whom he stared\noddly from the side of the road. Then for three hours he disappeared\nfrom view. The police, on the strength of what he said to Michaelis,\nthat he “had a way of finding out,” supposed that he spent that time\ngoing from garage to garage thereabout, inquiring for a yellow car. On\nthe other hand, no garage man who had seen him ever came forward, and\nperhaps he had an easier, surer way of finding out what he wanted to\nknow. By half-past two he was in West Egg, where he asked someone the\nway to Gatsby’s house. So by that time he knew Gatsby’s name.\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nAt two o’clock Gatsby put on his bathing-suit and left word with the\nbutler that if anyone phoned word was to be brought to him at the\npool. He stopped at the garage for a pneumatic mattress that had\namused his guests during the summer, and the chauffeur helped him to\npump it up. Then he gave instructions that the open car wasn’t to be\ntaken out under any circumstances—and this was strange, because the\nfront right fender needed repair.\n\nGatsby shouldered the mattress and started for the pool. Once he\nstopped and shifted it a little, and the chauffeur asked him if he\nneeded help, but he shook his head and in a moment disappeared among\nthe yellowing trees.\n\nNo telephone message arrived, but the butler went without his sleep\nand waited for it until four o’clock—until long after there was anyone\nto give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t\nbelieve it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was\ntrue he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a\nhigh price for living too long with a single dream. He must have\nlooked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered\nas he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight\nwas upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without\nbeing real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted\nfortuitously about … like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward\nhim through the amorphous trees.\n\nThe chauffeur—he was one of Wolfshiem’s protégés—heard the\nshots—afterwards he could only say that he hadn’t thought anything\nmuch about them. I drove from the station directly to Gatsby’s house\nand my rushing anxiously up the front steps was the first thing that\nalarmed anyone. But they knew then, I firmly believe. With scarcely a\nword said, four of us, the chauffeur, butler, gardener, and I hurried\ndown to the pool.\n\nThere was a faint, barely perceptible movement of the water as the\nfresh flow from one end urged its way toward the drain at the other.\nWith little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves, the laden\nmattress moved irregularly down the pool. A small gust of wind that\nscarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental\ncourse with its accidental burden. The touch of a cluster of leaves\nrevolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of transit, a thin red\ncircle in the water.\n\nIt was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener\nsaw Wilson’s body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was\ncomplete.\n\n\n                                  IX\n\nAfter two years I remember the rest of that day, and that night and\nthe next day, only as an endless drill of police and photographers and\nnewspaper men in and out of Gatsby’s front door. A rope stretched\nacross the main gate and a policeman by it kept out the curious, but\nlittle boys soon discovered that they could enter through my yard, and\nthere were always a few of them clustered open-mouthed about the\npool. Someone with a positive manner, perhaps a detective, used the\nexpression “madman” as he bent over Wilson’s body that afternoon, and\nthe adventitious authority of his voice set the key for the newspaper\nreports next morning.\n\nMost of those reports were a nightmare—grotesque, circumstantial,\neager, and untrue. When Michaelis’s testimony at the inquest brought\nto light Wilson’s suspicions of his wife I thought the whole tale\nwould shortly be served up in racy pasquinade—but Catherine, who might\nhave said anything, didn’t say a word. She showed a surprising amount\nof character about it too—looked at the coroner with determined eyes\nunder that corrected brow of hers, and swore that her sister had never\nseen Gatsby, that her sister was completely happy with her husband,\nthat her sister had been into no mischief whatever. She convinced\nherself of it, and cried into her handkerchief, as if the very\nsuggestion was more than she could endure. So Wilson was reduced to a\nman “deranged by grief” in order that the case might remain in its\nsimplest form. And it rested there.\n\nBut all this part of it seemed remote and unessential. I found myself\non Gatsby’s side, and alone. From the moment I telephoned news of the\ncatastrophe to West Egg village, every surmise about him, and every\npractical question, was referred to me. At first I was surprised and\nconfused; then, as he lay in his house and didn’t move or breathe or\nspeak, hour upon hour, it grew upon me that I was responsible, because\nno one else was interested—interested, I mean, with that intense\npersonal interest to which everyone has some vague right at the end.\n\nI called up Daisy half an hour after we found him, called her\ninstinctively and without hesitation. But she and Tom had gone away\nearly that afternoon, and taken baggage with them.\n\n“Left no address?”\n\n“No.”\n\n“Say when they’d be back?”\n\n“No.”\n\n“Any idea where they are? How I could reach them?”\n\n“I don’t know. Can’t say.”\n\nI wanted to get somebody for him. I wanted to go into the room where\nhe lay and reassure him: “I’ll get somebody for you, Gatsby. Don’t\nworry. Just trust me and I’ll get somebody for you—”\n\nMeyer Wolfshiem’s name wasn’t in the phone book. The butler gave me\nhis office address on Broadway, and I called Information, but by the\ntime I had the number it was long after five, and no one answered the\nphone.\n\n“Will you ring again?”\n\n“I’ve rung three times.”\n\n“It’s very important.”\n\n“Sorry. I’m afraid no one’s there.”\n\nI went back to the drawing-room and thought for an instant that they\nwere chance visitors, all these official people who suddenly filled\nit. But, though they drew back the sheet and looked at Gatsby with\nshocked eyes, his protest continued in my brain:\n\n“Look here, old sport, you’ve got to get somebody for me. You’ve got\nto try hard. I can’t go through this alone.”\n\nSomeone started to ask me questions, but I broke away and going\nupstairs looked hastily through the unlocked parts of his desk—he’d\nnever told me definitely that his parents were dead. But there was\nnothing—only the picture of Dan Cody, a token of forgotten violence,\nstaring down from the wall.\n\nNext morning I sent the butler to New York with a letter to Wolfshiem,\nwhich asked for information and urged him to come out on the next\ntrain. That request seemed superfluous when I wrote it. I was sure\nhe’d start when he saw the newspapers, just as I was sure there’d be a\nwire from Daisy before noon—but neither a wire nor Mr. Wolfshiem\narrived; no one arrived except more police and photographers and\nnewspaper men. When the butler brought back Wolfshiem’s answer I began\nto have a feeling of defiance, of scornful solidarity between Gatsby\nand me against them all.\n\n Dear Mr. Carraway. This has been one of the most terrible shocks of\n my life to me I hardly can believe it that it is true at all. Such a\n mad act as that man did should make us all think. I cannot come down\n now as I am tied up in some very important business and cannot get\n mixed up in this thing now. If there is anything I can do a little\n later let me know in a letter by Edgar. I hardly know where I am when\n I hear about a thing like this and am completely knocked down and\n out.\n\n                               Yours truly\n\n                             Meyer Wolfshiem\n\nand then hasty addenda beneath:\n\n Let me know about the funeral etc do not know his family at all.\n\nWhen the phone rang that afternoon and Long Distance said Chicago was\ncalling I thought this would be Daisy at last. But the connection came\nthrough as a man’s voice, very thin and far away.\n\n“This is Slagle speaking …”\n\n“Yes?” The name was unfamiliar.\n\n“Hell of a note, isn’t it? Get my wire?”\n\n“There haven’t been any wires.”\n\n“Young Parke’s in trouble,” he said rapidly. “They picked him up when\nhe handed the bonds over the counter. They got a circular from New\nYork giving ’em the numbers just five minutes before. What d’you know\nabout that, hey? You never can tell in these hick towns—”\n\n“Hello!” I interrupted breathlessly. “Look here—this isn’t Mr.\nGatsby. Mr. Gatsby’s dead.”\n\nThere was a long silence on the other end of the wire, followed by an\nexclamation … then a quick squawk as the connection was broken.\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nI think it was on the third day that a telegram signed Henry C. Gatz\narrived from a town in Minnesota. It said only that the sender was\nleaving immediately and to postpone the funeral until he came.\n\nIt was Gatsby’s father, a solemn old man, very helpless and dismayed,\nbundled up in a long cheap ulster against the warm September day. His\neyes leaked continuously with excitement, and when I took the bag and\numbrella from his hands he began to pull so incessantly at his sparse\ngrey beard that I had difficulty in getting off his coat. He was on\nthe point of collapse, so I took him into the music-room and made him\nsit down while I sent for something to eat. But he wouldn’t eat, and\nthe glass of milk spilled from his trembling hand.\n\n“I saw it in the Chicago newspaper,” he said. “It was all in the\nChicago newspaper. I started right away.”\n\n“I didn’t know how to reach you.”\n\nHis eyes, seeing nothing, moved ceaselessly about the room.\n\n“It was a madman,” he said. “He must have been mad.”\n\n“Wouldn’t you like some coffee?” I urged him.\n\n“I don’t want anything. I’m all right now, Mr.—”\n\n“Carraway.”\n\n“Well, I’m all right now. Where have they got Jimmy?”\n\nI took him into the drawing-room, where his son lay, and left him\nthere. Some little boys had come up on the steps and were looking into\nthe hall; when I told them who had arrived, they went reluctantly\naway.\n\nAfter a little while Mr. Gatz opened the door and came out, his mouth\najar, his face flushed slightly, his eyes leaking isolated and\nunpunctual tears. He had reached an age where death no longer has the\nquality of ghastly surprise, and when he looked around him now for the\nfirst time and saw the height and splendour of the hall and the great\nrooms opening out from it into other rooms, his grief began to be\nmixed with an awed pride. I helped him to a bedroom upstairs; while he\ntook off his coat and vest I told him that all arrangements had been\ndeferred until he came.\n\n“I didn’t know what you’d want, Mr. Gatsby—”\n\n“Gatz is my name.”\n\n“—Mr. Gatz. I thought you might want to take the body West.”\n\nHe shook his head.\n\n“Jimmy always liked it better down East. He rose up to his position in\nthe East. Were you a friend of my boy’s, Mr.—?”\n\n“We were close friends.”\n\n“He had a big future before him, you know. He was only a young man,\nbut he had a lot of brain power here.”\n\nHe touched his head impressively, and I nodded.\n\n“If he’d of lived, he’d of been a great man. A man like James J.\nHill. He’d of helped build up the country.”\n\n“That’s true,” I said, uncomfortably.\n\nHe fumbled at the embroidered coverlet, trying to take it from the\nbed, and lay down stiffly—was instantly asleep.\n\nThat night an obviously frightened person called up, and demanded to\nknow who I was before he would give his name.\n\n“This is Mr. Carraway,” I said.\n\n“Oh!” He sounded relieved. “This is Klipspringer.”\n\nI was relieved too, for that seemed to promise another friend at\nGatsby’s grave. I didn’t want it to be in the papers and draw a\nsightseeing crowd, so I’d been calling up a few people myself. They\nwere hard to find.\n\n“The funeral’s tomorrow,” I said. “Three o’clock, here at the house.\nI wish you’d tell anybody who’d be interested.”\n\n“Oh, I will,” he broke out hastily. “Of course I’m not likely to see\nanybody, but if I do.”\n\nHis tone made me suspicious.\n\n“Of course you’ll be there yourself.”\n\n“Well, I’ll certainly try. What I called up about is—”\n\n“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “How about saying you’ll come?”\n\n“Well, the fact is—the truth of the matter is that I’m staying with\nsome people up here in Greenwich, and they rather expect me to be with\nthem tomorrow. In fact, there’s a sort of picnic or something. Of\ncourse I’ll do my best to get away.”\n\nI ejaculated an unrestrained “Huh!” and he must have heard me, for he\nwent on nervously:\n\n“What I called up about was a pair of shoes I left there. I wonder if\nit’d be too much trouble to have the butler send them on. You see,\nthey’re tennis shoes, and I’m sort of helpless without them. My\naddress is care of B. F.—”\n\nI didn’t hear the rest of the name, because I hung up the receiver.\n\nAfter that I felt a certain shame for Gatsby—one gentleman to whom I\ntelephoned implied that he had got what he deserved. However, that was\nmy fault, for he was one of those who used to sneer most bitterly at\nGatsby on the courage of Gatsby’s liquor, and I should have known\nbetter than to call him.\n\nThe morning of the funeral I went up to New York to see Meyer\nWolfshiem; I couldn’t seem to reach him any other way. The door that I\npushed open, on the advice of an elevator boy, was marked “The\nSwastika Holding Company,” and at first there didn’t seem to be anyone\ninside. But when I’d shouted “hello” several times in vain, an\nargument broke out behind a partition, and presently a lovely Jewess\nappeared at an interior door and scrutinized me with black hostile\neyes.\n\n“Nobody’s in,” she said. “Mr. Wolfshiem’s gone to Chicago.”\n\nThe first part of this was obviously untrue, for someone had begun to\nwhistle “The Rosary,” tunelessly, inside.\n\n“Please say that Mr. Carraway wants to see him.”\n\n“I can’t get him back from Chicago, can I?”\n\nAt this moment a voice, unmistakably Wolfshiem’s, called “Stella!”\nfrom the other side of the door.\n\n“Leave your name on the desk,” she said quickly. “I’ll give it to him\nwhen he gets back.”\n\n“But I know he’s there.”\n\nShe took a step toward me and began to slide her hands indignantly up\nand down her hips.\n\n“You young men think you can force your way in here any time,” she\nscolded. “We’re getting sickantired of it. When I say he’s in Chicago,\nhe’s in Chicago.”\n\nI mentioned Gatsby.\n\n“Oh-h!” She looked at me over again. “Will you just—What was your\nname?”\n\nShe vanished. In a moment Meyer Wolfshiem stood solemnly in the\ndoorway, holding out both hands. He drew me into his office, remarking\nin a reverent voice that it was a sad time for all of us, and offered\nme a cigar.\n\n“My memory goes back to when first I met him,” he said. “A young major\njust out of the army and covered over with medals he got in the war.\nHe was so hard up he had to keep on wearing his uniform because he\ncouldn’t buy some regular clothes. First time I saw him was when he\ncame into Winebrenner’s poolroom at Forty-third Street and asked for a\njob. He hadn’t eat anything for a couple of days. ‘Come on have some\nlunch with me,’ I said. He ate more than four dollars’ worth of food\nin half an hour.”\n\n“Did you start him in business?” I inquired.\n\n“Start him! I made him.”\n\n“Oh.”\n\n“I raised him up out of nothing, right out of the gutter. I saw right\naway he was a fine-appearing, gentlemanly young man, and when he told\nme he was at Oggsford I knew I could use him good. I got him to join\nthe American Legion and he used to stand high there. Right off he did\nsome work for a client of mine up to Albany. We were so thick like\nthat in everything”—he held up two bulbous fingers—“always together.”\n\nI wondered if this partnership had included the World’s Series\ntransaction in 1919.\n\n“Now he’s dead,” I said after a moment. “You were his closest friend,\nso I know you’ll want to come to his funeral this afternoon.”\n\n“I’d like to come.”\n\n“Well, come then.”\n\nThe hair in his nostrils quivered slightly, and as he shook his head\nhis eyes filled with tears.\n\n“I can’t do it—I can’t get mixed up in it,” he said.\n\n“There’s nothing to get mixed up in. It’s all over now.”\n\n“When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it in any\nway. I keep out. When I was a young man it was different—if a friend\nof mine died, no matter how, I stuck with them to the end. You may\nthink that’s sentimental, but I mean it—to the bitter end.”\n\nI saw that for some reason of his own he was determined not to come,\nso I stood up.\n\n“Are you a college man?” he inquired suddenly.\n\nFor a moment I thought he was going to suggest a “gonnegtion,” but he\nonly nodded and shook my hand.\n\n“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and\nnot after he is dead,” he suggested. “After that my own rule is to let\neverything alone.”\n\nWhen I left his office the sky had turned dark and I got back to West\nEgg in a drizzle. After changing my clothes I went next door and found\nMr. Gatz walking up and down excitedly in the hall. His pride in his\nson and in his son’s possessions was continually increasing and now he\nhad something to show me.\n\n“Jimmy sent me this picture.” He took out his wallet with trembling\nfingers. “Look there.”\n\nIt was a photograph of the house, cracked in the corners and dirty\nwith many hands. He pointed out every detail to me eagerly. “Look\nthere!” and then sought admiration from my eyes. He had shown it so\noften that I think it was more real to him now than the house itself.\n\n“Jimmy sent it to me. I think it’s a very pretty picture. It shows up\nwell.”\n\n“Very well. Had you seen him lately?”\n\n“He come out to see me two years ago and bought me the house I live in\nnow. Of course we was broke up when he run off from home, but I see\nnow there was a reason for it. He knew he had a big future in front of\nhim. And ever since he made a success he was very generous with me.”\n\nHe seemed reluctant to put away the picture, held it for another\nminute, lingeringly, before my eyes. Then he returned the wallet and\npulled from his pocket a ragged old copy of a book called Hopalong\nCassidy.\n\n“Look here, this is a book he had when he was a boy. It just shows\nyou.”\n\nHe opened it at the back cover and turned it around for me to see. On\nthe last flyleaf was printed the word schedule, and the date September\n12, 1906. And underneath:\n\n    Rise from bed                                  6:00      a.m.\n    Dumbell exercise and wall-scaling              6:15-6:30 ”\n    Study electricity, etc.                        7:15-8:15 ”\n    Work                                           8:30-4:30 p.m.\n    Baseball and sports                            4:30-5:00 ”\n    Practise elocution, poise and how to attain it 5:00-6:00 ”\n    Study needed inventions                        7:00-9:00 ”\n\n               General Resolves\n\n  * No wasting time at Shafters or [a name, indecipherable]\n\n  * No more smokeing or chewing.\n\n  * Bath every other day\n\n  * Read one improving book or magazine per week\n\n  * Save $5.00 [crossed out] $3.00 per week\n\n  * Be better to parents\n\n“I came across this book by accident,” said the old man. “It just\nshows you, don’t it?”\n\n“It just shows you.”\n\n“Jimmy was bound to get ahead. He always had some resolves like this\nor something. Do you notice what he’s got about improving his mind? He\nwas always great for that. He told me I et like a hog once, and I beat\nhim for it.”\n\nHe was reluctant to close the book, reading each item aloud and then\nlooking eagerly at me. I think he rather expected me to copy down the\nlist for my own use.\n\nA little before three the Lutheran minister arrived from Flushing, and\nI began to look involuntarily out the windows for other cars. So did\nGatsby’s father. And as the time passed and the servants came in and\nstood waiting in the hall, his eyes began to blink anxiously, and he\nspoke of the rain in a worried, uncertain way. The minister glanced\nseveral times at his watch, so I took him aside and asked him to wait\nfor half an hour. But it wasn’t any use. Nobody came.\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nAbout five o’clock our procession of three cars reached the cemetery\nand stopped in a thick drizzle beside the gate—first a motor hearse,\nhorribly black and wet, then Mr. Gatz and the minister and me in the\nlimousine, and a little later four or five servants and the postman\nfrom West Egg, in Gatsby’s station wagon, all wet to the skin. As we\nstarted through the gate into the cemetery I heard a car stop and then\nthe sound of someone splashing after us over the soggy ground. I\nlooked around. It was the man with owl-eyed glasses whom I had found\nmarvelling over Gatsby’s books in the library one night three months\nbefore.\n\nI’d never seen him since then. I don’t know how he knew about the\nfuneral, or even his name. The rain poured down his thick glasses, and\nhe took them off and wiped them to see the protecting canvas unrolled\nfrom Gatsby’s grave.\n\nI tried to think about Gatsby then for a moment, but he was already\ntoo far away, and I could only remember, without resentment, that\nDaisy hadn’t sent a message or a flower. Dimly I heard someone murmur\n“Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on,” and then the owl-eyed\nman said “Amen to that,” in a brave voice.\n\nWe straggled down quickly through the rain to the cars. Owl-eyes spoke\nto me by the gate.\n\n“I couldn’t get to the house,” he remarked.\n\n“Neither could anybody else.”\n\n“Go on!” He started. “Why, my God! they used to go there by the\nhundreds.”\n\nHe took off his glasses and wiped them again, outside and in.\n\n“The poor son-of-a-bitch,” he said.\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nOne of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school\nand later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than\nChicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o’clock of a\nDecember evening, with a few Chicago friends, already caught up into\ntheir own holiday gaieties, to bid them a hasty goodbye. I remember\nthe fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-That’s and the\nchatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught\nsight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: “Are you\ngoing to the Ordways’? the Herseys’? the Schultzes’?” and the long\ngreen tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky\nyellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad looking\ncheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.\n\nWhen we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow,\nbegan to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and\nthe dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild\nbrace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we\nwalked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware\nof our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we\nmelted indistinguishably into it again.\n\nThat’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede\ntowns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street\nlamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly\nwreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a\nlittle solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent\nfrom growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are\nstill called through decades by a family’s name. I see now that this\nhas been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and\nJordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some\ndeficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.\n\nEven when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware\nof its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the\nOhio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the\nchildren and the very old—even then it had always for me a quality of\ndistortion. West Egg, especially, still figures in my more fantastic\ndreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at\nonce conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging\nsky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress\nsuits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a\ndrunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over\nthe side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a\nhouse—the wrong house. But no one knows the woman’s name, and no one\ncares.\n\nAfter Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted\nbeyond my eyes’ power of correction. So when the blue smoke of brittle\nleaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the\nline I decided to come back home.\n\nThere was one thing to be done before I left, an awkward, unpleasant\nthing that perhaps had better have been let alone. But I wanted to\nleave things in order and not just trust that obliging and indifferent\nsea to sweep my refuse away. I saw Jordan Baker and talked over and\naround what had happened to us together, and what had happened\nafterward to me, and she lay perfectly still, listening, in a big\nchair.\n\nShe was dressed to play golf, and I remember thinking she looked like\na good illustration, her chin raised a little jauntily, her hair the\ncolour of an autumn leaf, her face the same brown tint as the\nfingerless glove on her knee. When I had finished she told me without\ncomment that she was engaged to another man. I doubted that, though\nthere were several she could have married at a nod of her head, but I\npretended to be surprised. For just a minute I wondered if I wasn’t\nmaking a mistake, then I thought it all over again quickly and got up\nto say goodbye.\n\n“Nevertheless you did throw me over,” said Jordan suddenly. “You threw\nme over on the telephone. I don’t give a damn about you now, but it\nwas a new experience for me, and I felt a little dizzy for a while.”\n\nWe shook hands.\n\n“Oh, and do you remember”—she added—“a conversation we had once about\ndriving a car?”\n\n“Why—not exactly.”\n\n“You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver?\nWell, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me\nto make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest,\nstraightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.”\n\n“I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and\ncall it honour.”\n\nShe didn’t answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously\nsorry, I turned away.\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nOne afternoon late in October I saw Tom Buchanan. He was walking ahead\nof me along Fifth Avenue in his alert, aggressive way, his hands out a\nlittle from his body as if to fight off interference, his head moving\nsharply here and there, adapting itself to his restless eyes. Just as\nI slowed up to avoid overtaking him he stopped and began frowning into\nthe windows of a jewellery store. Suddenly he saw me and walked back,\nholding out his hand.\n\n“What’s the matter, Nick? Do you object to shaking hands with me?”\n\n“Yes. You know what I think of you.”\n\n“You’re crazy, Nick,” he said quickly. “Crazy as hell. I don’t know\nwhat’s the matter with you.”\n\n“Tom,” I inquired, “what did you say to Wilson that afternoon?”\n\nHe stared at me without a word, and I knew I had guessed right about\nthose missing hours. I started to turn away, but he took a step after\nme and grabbed my arm.\n\n“I told him the truth,” he said. “He came to the door while we were\ngetting ready to leave, and when I sent down word that we weren’t in\nhe tried to force his way upstairs. He was crazy enough to kill me if\nI hadn’t told him who owned the car. His hand was on a revolver in his\npocket every minute he was in the house—” He broke off defiantly.\n“What if I did tell him? That fellow had it coming to him. He threw\ndust into your eyes just like he did in Daisy’s, but he was a tough\none. He ran over Myrtle like you’d run over a dog and never even\nstopped his car.”\n\nThere was nothing I could say, except the one unutterable fact that it\nwasn’t true.\n\n“And if you think I didn’t have my share of suffering—look here, when\nI went to give up that flat and saw that damn box of dog biscuits\nsitting there on the sideboard, I sat down and cried like a baby. By\nGod it was awful—”\n\nI couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done\nwas, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and\nconfused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up\nthings and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their\nvast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let\nother people clean up the mess they had made …\n\nI shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as\nthough I were talking to a child. Then he went into the jewellery\nstore to buy a pearl necklace—or perhaps only a pair of cuff\nbuttons—rid of my provincial squeamishness forever.\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nGatsby’s house was still empty when I left—the grass on his lawn had\ngrown as long as mine. One of the taxi drivers in the village never\ntook a fare past the entrance gate without stopping for a minute and\npointing inside; perhaps it was he who drove Daisy and Gatsby over to\nEast Egg the night of the accident, and perhaps he had made a story\nabout it all his own. I didn’t want to hear it and I avoided him when\nI got off the train.\n\nI spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming,\ndazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still\nhear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant, from his garden,\nand the cars going up and down his drive. One night I did hear a\nmaterial car there, and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I\ndidn’t investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away\nat the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over.\n\nOn the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer,\nI went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once\nmore. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a\npiece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it,\ndrawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the\nbeach and sprawled out on the sand.\n\nMost of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any\nlights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the\nSound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to\nmelt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that\nflowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new\nworld. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s\nhouse, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all\nhuman dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his\nbreath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic\ncontemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the\nlast time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for\nwonder.\n\nAnd as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of\nGatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of\nDaisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream\nmust have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He\ndid not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that\nvast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic\nrolled on under the night.\n\nGatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by\nyear recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no\nmatter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further … And\none fine morning—\n\nSo we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into\nthe past.\n\n\n\n            *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREAT GATSBY ***\n\n\n\n\nUpdated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will\nbe renamed.\n\nCreating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright\nlaw means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,\nso the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United\nStates without permission and without paying copyright\nroyalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part\nof this license, apply to copying and distributing Project\nGutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™\nconcept and trademark. 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