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been in several things," he corrected himself. "I was in the drug business
and then I was in the oil business. But I'm not in either one now." He
looked at me with more attention. "Do you mean you've been thinking over
what I proposed the other night?" Before I could answer, Daisy came out of
the house and two rows of brass buttons on her dress gleamed in the
sunlight. "That huge place THERE?" she cried pointing. "Do you like it?" "I
love it, but I don't see how you live there all alone." "I keep it always
full of interesting people, night and day. People who do interesting things.
Celebrated people." Instead of taking the short cut along the Sound we went
down the road and entered by the big postern. With enchanting murmurs Daisy
admired this aspect or that of the feudal silhouette against the sky,
admired the gardens, the sparkling odor of jonquils and the frothy odor of
hawthorn and plum blossoms and the pale gold odor of kiss-me-at-the-gate. It
was strange to reach the marble steps and find no stir of bright dresses in
and out the door, and hear no sound but bird voices in the trees. And
inside, as we wandered through Marie Antoinette music-rooms and Restoration
salons, I felt that there were guests concealed behind every couch and
table, under orders to be breathlessly silent until we had passed through.
As Gatsby closed the door of "the Merton College Library." I could have
sworn I heard the owl-eyed man break into ghostly laughter. We went
up-stairs, through period bedrooms swathed in rose and lavender silk and
vivid with new flowers, through dressing-rooms and poolrooms, and bathrooms
with sunken baths--intruding into one chamber where a dishevelled man in
pajamas was doing liver exercises on the floor. It was Mr. Klipspringer, the
"boarder." I had seen him wandering hungrily about the beach that morning.
Finally we came to Gatsby's own apartment, a bedroom and a bath, and an Adam
study, where we sat down and drank a glass of some Chartreuse he took from a
cupboard in the wall. He hadn't once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he
revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it
drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his
possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence
none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly toppled down a flight of
stairs. His bedroom was the simplest room of all--except where the dresser
was garnished with a toilet set of pure dull gold. Daisy took the brush with
delight, and smoothed her hair, whereupon Gatsby sat down and shaded his
eyes and began to laugh. "It's the funniest thing, old sport," he said
hilariously. "I can't--When I try to----" He had passed visibly through two
states and was entering upon a third. After his embarrassment and his
unreasoning joy he was consumed with wonder at her presence. He had been
full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with
his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in
the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock. Recovering
himself in a minute he opened for us two hulking patent cabinets which held
his massed suits and dressing-gowns and ties, and his shirts, piled like
bricks in stacks a dozen high. "I've got a man in England who buys me
clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each
season, spring and fall." He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing
them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine
flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in
many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich
heap mounted higher--shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and
apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue.
Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and
began to cry stormily. "They're such beautiful shirts," she sobbed, her
voice muffled in the thick folds. "It makes me sad because I've never seen
such--such beautiful shirts before." After the house, we were to see the
grounds and the swimming-pool, and the hydroplane and the mid-summer
flowers--but outside Gatsby's window it began to rain again, so we stood in
a row looking at the corrugated surface of the Sound. "If it wasn't for the
mist we could see your home across the bay," said Gatsby. "You always have a
green light that burns all night at the end of your dock." Daisy put her arm
through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said.
Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light
had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated
him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had
seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a
dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one. I began to walk
about the room, examining various indefinite objects in the half darkness. A
large photograph of an elderly man in yachting costume attracted me, hung on
the wall over his desk. "Who's this?" "That? That's Mr. Dan Cody, old
sport." The name sounded faintly familiar. "He's dead now. He used to be my
best friend years ago." There was a small picture of Gatsby, also in
yachting costume, on the bureau--Gatsby with his head thrown back
defiantly--taken apparently when he was about eighteen. "I adore it,"
exclaimed Daisy. "The pompadour! You never told me you had a pompadour--or a
yacht." "Look at this," said Gatsby quickly. "Here's a lot of
clippings--about you." They stood side by side examining it. I was going to
ask to see the rubies when the phone rang, and Gatsby took up the receiver.
"Yes. . . . well, I can't talk now. . . . I can't talk now, old sport. . . .
I said a SMALL town. . . . he must know what a small town is. . . . well,
he's no use to us if Detroit is his idea of a small town. . . ." He rang
off. "Come here QUICK!" cried Daisy at the window. The rain was still
falling, but the darkness had parted in the west, and there was a pink and
golden billow of foamy clouds above the sea. "Look at that," she whispered,
and then after a moment: "I'd like to just get one of those pink clouds and
put you in it and push you around." I tried to go then, but they wouldn't
hear of it; perhaps my presence made them feel more satisfactorily alone. "I
know what we'll do," said Gatsby, "we'll have Klipspringer play the piano."
He went out of the room calling "Ewing!" and returned in a few minutes
accompanied by an embarrassed, slightly worn young man, with shell-rimmed
glasses and scanty blond hair. He was now decently clothed in a "sport
shirt," open at the neck, sneakers, and duck trousers of a nebulous hue.
"Did we interrupt your exercises?" inquired Daisy politely. "I was asleep,"
cried Mr. Klipspringer, in a spasm of embarrassment. "That is, I'd BEEN
asleep. Then I got up. . . ." "Klipspringer plays the piano," said Gatsby,
cutting him off. "Don't you, Ewing, old sport?" "I don't play well. I
don't--I hardly play at all. I'm all out of prac----" "We'll go
down-stairs," interrupted Gatsby. He flipped a switch. The gray windows
disappeared as the house glowed full of light. In the music-room Gatsby
turned on a solitary lamp beside the piano. He lit Daisy's cigarette from a
trembling match, and sat down with her on a couch far across the room, where
there was no light save what the gleaming floor bounced in from the hall.
When Klipspringer had played THE LOVE NEST. he turned around on the bench
and searched unhappily for Gatsby in the gloom. "I'm all out of practice,
you see. I told you I couldn't play. I'm all out of prac----" "Don't talk so
much, old sport," commanded Gatsby. "Play!" "IN THE MORNING, IN THE EVENING,
AIN'T WE GOT FUN----" Outside the wind was loud and there was a faint flow
of thunder along the Sound. All the lights were going on in West Egg now;
the electric trains, men-carrying, were plunging home through the rain from
New York. It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was
generating on the air. "ONE THING'S SURE AND NOTHING'S SURER THE RICH GET
RICHER AND THE POOR GET--CHILDREN. IN THE MEANTIME, IN BETWEEN TIME----" As
I went over to say good-by I saw that the expression of bewilderment had
come back into Gatsby's face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as
to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have
been moments even that afternoon whe Daisy tumbled short of his dreams--not
through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.
It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it
with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with
every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness
can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart. As I watched
him he adjusted himself a little, visibly. His hand took hold of hers, and
as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of
emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish
warmth, because it couldn't be over-dreamed--that voice was a deathless
song. They had forgotten me, but Daisy glanced up and held out her hand;
Gatsby didn't know me now at all. I looked once more at them and they looked
back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life. Then I went out of the room
and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them there together.
Chapter 6 About this time an ambitious young reporter from New York arrived
one morning at Gatsby's door and asked him if he had anything to say.
"Anything to say about what?" inquired Gatsby politely. "Why--any statement
to give out." It transpired after a confused five minutes that the man had
heard Gatsby's name around his office in a connection which he either
wouldn't reveal or didn't fully understand. This was his day off and with
laudable initiative he had hurried out "to see." It was a random shot, and
yet the reporter's instinct was right. Gatsby's notoriety, spread about by
the hundreds who had accepted his hospitality and so become authorities on
his past, had increased all summer until he fell just short of being news.
Contemporary legends such as the "underground pipe-line to Canada." attached
themselves to him, and there was one persistent story that he didn't live in
a house at all, but in a boat that looked like a house and was moved
secretly up and down the Long Island shore. Just why these inventions were a
source of satisfaction to James Gatz of North Dakota, isn't easy to say.
James Gatz--that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed
it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the
beginning of his career--when he saw Dan Cody's yacht drop anchor over the
most insidious flat on Lake Superior. It was James Gatz who had been loafing
along the beach that afternoon in a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas
pants, but it was already Jay Gatsby who borrowed a rowboat, pulled out to
the TUOLOMEE, and informed Cody that a wind might catch him and break him up
in half an hour. I suppose he'd had the name ready for a long time, even
then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people--his
imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth
was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic
conception of himself. He was a son of God--a phrase which, if it means
anything, means just that--and he must be about His Father's business, the
service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the
sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent,
and to this conception he was faithful to the end. For over a year he had
been beating his way along the south shore of Lake Superior as a clam-digger
and a salmon-fisher or in any other capacity that brought him food and bed.
His brown, hardening body lived naturally through the half-fierce, half-lazy
work of the bracing days. He knew women early, and since they spoiled him he
became contemptuous of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of
the others because they were hysterical about things which in his
overwhelming self-absorbtion he took for granted. But his heart was in a
constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted
him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out
in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked
with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to
the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid
scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an
outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality
of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a
fairy's wing. An instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months
before, to the small Lutheran college of St. Olaf in southern Minnesota. He
stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums
of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor's work with
which he was to pay his way through. Then he drifted back to Lake Superior,
and he was still searching for something to do on the day that Dan Cody's
yacht dropped anchor in the shallows alongshore. Cody was fifty years old
then, a product of the Nevada silver fields, of the Yukon, of every rush for
metal since seventy-five. The transactions in Montana copper that made him
many times a millionaire found him physically robust but on the verge of
soft-mindedness, and, suspecting this, an infinite number of women tried to
separate him from his money. The none too savory ramifications by which Ella
Kaye, the newspaper woman, played Madame de Maintenon to his weakness and
sent him to sea in a yacht, were common knowledge to the turgid
sub-journalism of 1902. He had been coasting along all too hospitable shores
for five years when he turned up as James Gatz's destiny at Little Girls
Point. To the young Gatz, resting on his oars and looking up at the railed
deck, the yacht represented all the beauty and glamour in the world. I
suppose he smiled at Cody--he had probably discovered that people liked him
when he smiled. At any rate Cody asked him a few questions (one of them
elicited the brand new name) and found that he was quick and extravagantly
ambitious. A few days later he took him to Duluth and bought him a blue
coat, six pair of white duck trousers, and a yachting cap. And when the
TUOLOMEE left for the West Indies and the Barbary Coast Gatsby left too. He
was employed in a vague personal capacity--while he remained with Cody he
was in turn steward, mate, skipper, secretary, and even jailor, for Dan Cody
sober knew what lavish doings Dan Cody drunk might soon be about, and he
provided for such contingencies by reposing more and more trust in Gatsby.
The arrangement lasted five years, during which the boat went three times
around the Continent. It might have lasted indefinitely except for the fact
that Ella Kaye came on board one night in Boston and a week later Dan Cody
inhospitably died. I remember the portrait of him up in Gatsby's bedroom, a
gray, florid man with a hard, empty face--the pioneer debauchee, who during
one phase of American life brought back to the Eastern seaboard the savage
violence of the frontier brothel and saloon. It was indirectly due to Cody
that Gatsby drank so little. Sometimes in the course of gay parties women
used to rub champagne into his hair; for himself he formed the habit of
letting liquor alone. And it was from Cody that he inherited money--a legacy
of twenty-five thousand dollars. He didn't get it. He never understood the
legal device that was used against him, but what remained of the millions
went intact to Ella Kaye. He was left with his singularly appropriate
education; the vague contour of Jay Gatsby had filled out to the
substantiality of a man. He told me all this very much later, but I've put
it down here with the idea of exploding those first wild rumors about his
antecedents, which weren't even faintly true. Moreover he told it to me at a
time of confusion, when I had reached the point of believing everything and
nothing about him. So I take advantage of this short halt, while Gatsby, so
to speak, caught his breath, to clear this set of misconceptions away. It
was a halt, too, in my association with his affairs. For several weeks I
didn't see him or hear his voice on the phone--mostly I was in New York,
trotting around with Jordan and trying to ingratiate myself with her senile
aunt--but finally I went over to his house one Sunday afternoon. I hadn't
been there two minutes when somebody brought Tom Buchanan in for a drink. I
was startled, naturally, but the really surprising thing was that it hadn't
happened before. They were a party of three on horseback--Tom and a man
named Sloane and a pretty woman in a brown riding-habit, who had been there
previously. "I'm delighted to see you," said Gatsby, standing on his porch.
"I'm delighted that you dropped in." As though they cared! "Sit right down.
Have a cigarette or a cigar." He walked around the room quickly, ringing
bells. "I'll have something to drink for you in just a minute." He was
profoundly affected by the fact that Tom was there. But he would be uneasy
anyhow until he had given them something, realizing in a vague way that that
was all they came for. Mr. Sloane wanted nothing. A lemonade? No, thanks. A
little champagne? Nothing at all, thanks. . . . I'm sorry---- "Did you have
a nice ride?" "Very good roads around here." "I suppose the automobiles----"
"Yeah." Moved by an irresistible impulse, Gatsby turned to Tom, who had
accepted the introduction as a stranger. "I believe we've met somewhere
before, Mr. Buchanan." "Oh, yes," said Tom, gruffly polite, but obviously
not remembering. "So we did. I remember very well." "About two weeks ago."
"That's right. You were with Nick here." "I know your wife," continued
Gatsby, almost aggressively. "That so?" Tom turned to me. "You live near
here, Nick?" "Next door." "That so?" Mr. Sloane didn't enter into the
conversation, but lounged back haughtily in his chair; the woman said
nothing either--until unexpectedly, after two highballs, she became cordial.
"We'll all come over to your next party, Mr. Gatsby," she suggested. "What
do you say?" "Certainly; I'd be delighted to have you." "Be ver' nice," said
Mr. Sloane, without gratitude. "Well--think ought to be starting home."
"Please don't hurry," Gatsby urged them. He had control of himself now, and
he wanted to see more of Tom. "Why don't you--why don't you stay for supper?
I wouldn't be surprised if some other people dropped in from New York." "You
come to supper with ME," said the lady enthusiastically. "Both of you." This
included me. Mr. Sloane got to his feet. "Come along," he said--but to her
only. "I mean it," she insisted. "I'd love to have you. Lots of room."
Gatsby looked at me questioningly. He wanted to go, and he didn't see that
Mr. Sloane had determined he shouldn't. "I'm afraid I won't be able to," I
said. "Well, you come," she urged, concentrating on Gatsby. Mr. Sloane
murmured something close to her ear. "We won't be late if we start now," she
insisted aloud. "I haven't got a horse," said Gatsby. "I used to ride in the
army, but I've never bought a horse. I'll have to follow you in my car.
Excuse me for just a minute." The rest of us walked out on the porch, where
Sloane and the lady began an impassioned conversation aside. "My God, I
believe the man's coming," said Tom. "Doesn't he know she doesn't want him?"
"She says she does want him." "She has a big dinner party and he won't know
a soul there." He frowned. "I wonder where in the devil he met Daisy. By
God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these
days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish." Suddenly Mr. Sloane and
the lady walked down the steps and mounted their horses. "Come on," said Mr.
Sloane to Tom, "we're late. We've got to go." And then to me: "Tell him we
couldn't wait, will you?" Tom and I shook hands, the rest of us exchanged a
cool nod, and they trotted quickly down the drive, disappearing under the
August foliage just as Gatsby, with hat and light overcoat in hand, came out
the front door. Tom was evidently perturbed at Daisy's running around alone,
for on the following Saturday night he came with her to Gatsby's party.
Perhaps his presence gave the evening its peculiar quality of
oppressiveness--it stands out in my memory from Gatsby's other parties that
summer. There were the same people, or at least the same sort of people, the
same profusion of champagne, the same many-colored, many-keyed commotion,
but I felt an unpleasantness in the air, a pervading harshness that hadn't
been there before. Or perhaps I had merely grown used to it, grown to accept
West Egg as a world complete in itself, with its own standards and its own
great figures, second to nothing because it had no consciousness of being
so, and now I was looking at it again, through Daisy's eyes. It is
invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have
expended your own powers of adjustment. They arrived at twilight, and, as we
strolled out among the sparkling hundreds, Daisy's voice was playing
murmurous tricks in her throat. "These things excite me so," she whispered.
"If you want to kiss me any time during the evening, Nick, just let me know
and I'll be glad to arrange it for you. Just mention my name. Or present a
green card. I'm giving out green----" "Look around," suggested Gatsby. "I'm
looking around. I'm having a marvelous----" "You must see the faces of many
people you've heard about." Tom's arrogant eyes roamed the crowd. "We don't
go around very much," he said. "In fact, I was just thinking I don't know a
soul here." "Perhaps you know that lady." Gatsby indicated a gorgeous,
scarcely human orchid of a woman who sat in state under a white plum tree.
Tom and Daisy stared, with that peculiarly unreal feeling that accompanies
the recognition of a hitherto ghostly celebrity of the movies. "She's
lovely," said Daisy. "The man bending over her is her director." He took
them ceremoniously from group to group: "Mrs. Buchanan . . . and Mr.
Buchanan----" After an instant's hesitation he added: "the polo player." "Oh
no," objected Tom quickly, "not me." But evidently the sound of it pleased
Gatsby, for Tom remained "the polo player." for the rest of the evening.
"I've never met so many celebrities!" Daisy exclaimed. "I liked that
man--what was his name?--with the sort of blue nose." Gatsby identified him,
adding that he was a small producer. "Well, I liked him anyhow." "I'd a
little rather not be the polo player," said Tom pleasantly, "I'd rather look
at all these famous people in--in oblivion." Daisy and Gatsby danced. I
remember being surprised by his graceful, conservative fox-trot--I had never
seen him dance before. Then they sauntered over to my house and sat on the
steps for half an hour, while at her request I remained watchfully in the
garden. "In case there's a fire or a flood," she explained, "or any act of
God." Tom appeared from his oblivion as we were sitting down to supper
together. "Do you mind if I eat with some people over here?" he said. "A
fellow's getting off some funny stuff." "Go ahead," answered Daisy genially,
"and if you want to take down any addresses here's my little gold pencil." .
. . she looked around after a moment and told me the girl was "common but
pretty," and I knew that except for the half-hour she'd been alone with
Gatsby she wasn't having a good time. We were at a particularly tipsy table.
That was my fault--Gatsby had been called to the phone, and I'd enjoyed
these same people only two weeks before. But what had amused me then turned
septic on the air now. "How do you feel, Miss Baedeker?" The girl addressed
was trying, unsuccessfully, to slump against my shoulder. At this inquiry
she sat up and opened her eyes. "Wha'?" A massive and lethargic woman, who
had been urging Daisy to play golf with her at the local club to-morrow,
spoke in Miss Baedeker's defence: "Oh, she's all right now. When she's had
five or six cocktails she always starts screaming like that. I tell her she
ought to leave it alone." "I do leave it alone," affirmed the accused
hollowly. "We heard you yelling, so I said to Doc Civet here: 'There's
somebody that needs your help, Doc.'" "She's much obliged, I'm sure," said
another friend, without gratitude. "But you got her dress all wet when you
stuck her head in the pool." "Anything I hate is to get my head stuck in a
pool," mumbled Miss Baedeker. "They almost drowned me once over in New
Jersey." "Then you ought to leave it alone," countered Doctor Civet. "Speak
for yourself!" cried Miss Baedeker violently. "Your hand shakes. I wouldn't
let you operate on me!" It was like that. Almost the last thing I remember
was standing with Daisy and watching the moving-picture director and his
Star. They were still under the white plum tree and their faces were
touching except for a pale, thin ray of moonlight between. It occurred to me
that he had been very slowly bending toward her all evening to attain this
proximity, and even while I watched I saw him stoop one ultimate degree and
kiss at her cheek. "I like her," said Daisy, "I think she's lovely." But the
rest offended her--and inarguably, because it wasn't a gesture but an
emotion. She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented "place." that
Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village--appalled by its
raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate
that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She
saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand. I sat
on the front steps with them while they waited for their car. It was dark
here in front; only the bright door sent ten square feet of light volleying
out into the soft black morning. Sometimes a shadow moved against a
dressing-room blind above, gave way to another shadow, an indefinite
procession of shadows, who rouged and powdered in an invisible glass. "Who
is this Gatsby anyhow?" demanded Tom suddenly. "Some big bootlegger?"
"Where'd you hear that?" I inquired. "I didn't hear it. I imagined it. A lot
of these newly rich people are just big bootleggers, you know." "Not
Gatsby," I said shortly. He was silent for a moment. The pebbles of the
drive crunched under his feet. "Well, he certainly must have strained
himself to get this menagerie together." A breeze stirred the gray haze of
Daisy's fur collar. "At least they're more interesting than the people we
know," she said with an effort. "You didn't look so interested." "Well, I
was." Tom laughed and turned to me. "Did you notice Daisy's face when that
girl asked her to put her under a cold shower?" Daisy began to sing with the
music in a husky, rhythmic whisper, bringing out a meaning in each word that
it had never had before and would never have again. When the melody rose,
her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have,
and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.
"Lots of people come who haven't been invited," she said suddenly. "That
girl hadn't been invited. They simply force their way in and he's too polite
to object." "I'd like to know who he is and what he does," insisted Tom.
"And I think I'll make a point of finding out." "I can tell you right now,"
she answered. "He owned some drug-stores, a lot of drug-stores. He built
them up himself." The dilatory limousine came rolling up the drive. "Good
night, Nick," said Daisy. Her glance left me and sought the lighted top of
the steps, where THREE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING, a neat, sad little waltz of
that year, was drifting out the open door. After all, in the very casualness
of Gatsby's party there were romantic possibilities totally absent from her
world. What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling her back
inside? What would happen now in the dim, incalculable hours? Perhaps some
unbelievable guest would arrive, a person infinitely rare and to be
marvelled at, some authentically radiant young girl who with one fresh
glance at Gatsby, one moment of magical encounter, would blot out those five
years of unwavering devotion. I stayed late that night, Gatsby asked me to
wait until he was free, and I lingered in the garden until the inevitable
swimming party had run up, chilled and exalted, from the black beach, until
the lights were extinguished in the guest-rooms overhead. When he came down
the steps at last the tanned skin was drawn unusually tight on his face, and
his eyes were bright and tired. "She didn't like it," he said immediately.
"Of course she did." "She didn't like it," he insisted. "She didn't have a
good time." He was silent, and I guessed at his unutterable depression. "I
feel far away from her," he said. "It's hard to make her understand." "You
mean about the dance?" "The dance?" He dismissed all the dances he had given
with a snap of his fingers. "Old sport, the dance is unimportant." He wanted
nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: "I never loved
you." After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could
decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that,
after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from
her house--just as if it were five years ago. "And she doesn't understand,"
he said. "She used to be able to understand. We'd sit for hours----" He
broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and
discarded favors and crushed flowers. "I wouldn't ask too much of her," I
ventured. "You can't repeat the past." "Can't repeat the past?" he cried
incredulously. "Why of course you can!" He looked around him wildly, as if
the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of
his hand. "I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before," he said,
nodding determinedly. "She'll see." He talked a lot about the past, and I
gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps,
that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered
since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go
over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was. . . . . . . One
autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when
the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees
and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned
toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement
in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the
houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle
among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of
the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the
trees--he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could
suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. His
heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He
knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions
to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of
God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had
been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she
blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. Through
all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of
something--an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard
somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my
mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more
struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound,
and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever. Chapter 7 It
was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights in his
house failed to go on one Saturday night--and, as obscurely as it had begun,
his career as Trimalchio was over. Only gradually did I become aware that
the automobiles which turned expectantly into his drive stayed for just a
minute and then drove sulkily away. Wondering if he were sick I went over to
find out--an unfamiliar butler with a villainous face squinted at me
suspiciously from the door. "Is Mr. Gatsby sick?" "Nope." After a pause he
added "sir." in a dilatory, grudging way. "I hadn't seen him around, and I
was rather worried. Tell him Mr. Carraway came over." "Who?" he demanded
rudely. "Carraway." "Carraway. All right, I'll tell him." Abruptly he
slammed the door. My Finn informed me that Gatsby had dismissed every
servant in his house a week ago and replaced them with half a dozen others,
who never went into West Egg Village to be bribed by the tradesmen, but
ordered moderate supplies over the telephone. The grocery boy reported that
the kitchen looked like a pigsty, and the general opinion in the village was
that the new people weren't servants at all. Next day Gatsby called me on
the phone. "Going away?" I inquired. "No, old sport." "I hear you fired all
your servants." "I wanted somebody who wouldn't gossip. Daisy comes over
quite often--in the afternoons." So the whole caravansary had fallen in like
a card house at the disapproval in her eyes. "They're some people Wolfshiem
wanted to do something for. They're all brothers and sisters. They used to
run a small hotel." "I see." He was calling up at Daisy's request--would I
come to lunch at her house to-morrow? Miss Baker would be there. Half an
hour later Daisy herself telephoned and seemed relieved to find that I was
coming. Something was up. And yet I couldn't believe that they would choose
this occasion for a scene--especially for the rather harrowing scene that
Gatsby had outlined in the garden. The next day was broiling, almost the
last, certainly the warmest, of the summer. As my train emerged from the
tunnel into sunlight, only the hot whistles of the National Biscuit Company
broke the simmering hush at noon. The straw seats of the car hovered on the
edge of combustion; the woman next to me perspired delicately for a while
into her white shirtwaist, and then, as her newspaper dampened under her
fingers, lapsed despairingly into deep heat with a desolate cry. Her
pocket-book slapped to the floor. "Oh, my!" she gasped. I picked it up with
a weary bend and handed it back to her, holding it at arm's length and by
the extreme tip of the corners to indicate that I had no designs upon
it--but every one near by, including the woman, suspected me just the same.
"Hot!" said the conductor to familiar faces. "Some weather! hot! hot! hot!
Is it hot enough for you? Is it hot? Is it . . . ?" My commutation ticket
came back to me with a dark stain from his hand. That any one should care in
this heat whose flushed lips he kissed, whose head made damp the pajama
pocket over his heart! . . . Through the hall of the Buchanans' house blew a
faint wind, carrying the sound of the telephone bell out to Gatsby and me as
we waited at the door. "The master's body!" roared the butler into the
mouthpiece. "I'm sorry, madame, but we can't furnish it--it's far too hot to
touch this noon!" What he really said was: "Yes . . . yes . . . I'll see."
He set down the receiver and came toward us, glistening slightly, to take
our stiff straw hats. "Madame expects you in the salon!" he cried,
needlessly indicating the direction. In this heat every extra gesture was an
affront to the common store of life. The room, shadowed well with awnings,
was dark and cool. Daisy and Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver
idols weighing down their own white dresses against the singing breeze of
the fans. "We can't move," they said together. Jordan's fingers, powdered
white over their tan, rested for a moment in mine. "And Mr. Thomas Buchanan,
the athlete?" I inquired. Simultaneously I heard his voice, gruff, muffled,
husky, at the hall telephone. Gatsby stood in the centre of the crimson
carpet and gazed around with fascinated eyes. Daisy watched him and laughed,
her sweet, exciting laugh; a tiny gust of powder rose from her bosom into
the air. "The rumor is," whispered Jordan, "that that's Tom's girl on the
telephone." We were silent. The voice in the hall rose high with annoyance:
"Very well, then, I won't sell you the car at all. . . . I'm under no
obligations to you at all . . . and as for your bothering me about it at
lunch time, I won't stand that at all!" "Holding down the receiver," said
Daisy cynically. "No, he's not," I assured her. "It's a bona-fide deal. I
happen to know about it." Tom flung open the door, blocked out its space for
a moment with his thick body, and hurried into the room. "Mr. Gatsby!" He
put out his broad, flat hand with well-concealed dislike. "I'm glad to see
you, sir. . . . Nick. . . ." "Make us a cold drink," cried Daisy. As he left
the room again she got up and went over to Gatsby and pulled his face down,
kissing him on the mouth. "You know I love you," she murmured. "You forget
there's a lady present," said Jordan. Daisy looked around doubtfully. "You
kiss Nick too." "What a low, vulgar girl!" "I don't care!" cried Daisy, and
began to clog on the brick fireplace. Then she remembered the heat and sat
down guiltily on the couch just as a freshly laundered nurse leading a
little girl came into the room. "Bles-sed pre-cious," she crooned, holding
out her arms. "Come to your own mother that loves you." The child,
relinquished by the nurse, rushed across the room and rooted shyly into her
mother's dress. "The bles-sed pre-cious! Did mother get powder on your old
yellowy hair? Stand up now, and say--How-de-do." Gatsby and I in turn leaned
down and took the small, reluctant hand. Afterward he kept looking at the
child with surprise. I don't think he had ever really believed in its
existence before. "I got dressed before luncheon," said the child, turning
eagerly to Daisy. "That's because your mother wanted to show you off." Her
face bent into the single wrinkle of the small, white neck. "You dream, you.
You absolute little dream." "Yes," admitted the child calmly. "Aunt Jordan's
got on a white dress too." "How do you like mother's friends?" Daisy turned
her around so that she faced Gatsby. "Do you think they're pretty?" "Where's
Daddy?" "She doesn't look like her father," explained Daisy. "She looks like
me. She's got my hair and shape of the face." Daisy sat back upon the couch.
The nurse took a step forward and held out her hand. "Come, Pammy."
"Good-by, sweetheart!" With a reluctant backward glance the well-disciplined
child held to her nurse's hand and was pulled out the door, just as Tom came
back, preceding four gin rickeys that clicked full of ice. Gatsby took up
his drink. "They certainly look cool," he said, with visible tension. We
drank in long, greedy swallows. "I read somewhere that the sun's getting
hotter every year," said Tom genially. "It seems that pretty soon the
earth's going to fall into the sun--or wait a minute--it's just the
opposite--the sun's getting colder every year. "Come outside," he suggested
to Gatsby, "I'd like you to have a look at the place." I went with them out
to the veranda. On the green Sound, stagnant in the heat, one small sail
crawled slowly toward the fresher sea. Gatsby's eyes followed it
momentarily; he raised his hand and pointed across the bay. "I'm right
across from you." "So you are." Our eyes lifted over the rose-beds and the
hot lawn and the weedy refuse of the dog-days along-shore. Slowly the white
wings of the boat moved against the blue cool limit of the sky. Ahead lay
the scalloped ocean and the abounding blessed isles. "There's sport for
you," said Tom, nodding. "I'd like to be out there with him for about an
hour." We had luncheon in the dining-room, darkened too against the heat,
and drank down nervous gayety with the cold ale. "What'll we do with
ourselves this afternoon?" cried Daisy, "and the day after that, and the
next thirty years?" "Don't be morbid," Jordan said. "Life starts all over
again when it gets crisp in the fall." "But it's so hot," insisted Daisy, on
the verge of tears, "and everything's so confused. Let's all go to town!"
Her voice struggled on through the heat, beating against it, molding its
senselessness into forms. "I've heard of making a garage out of a stable,"
Tom was saying to Gatsby, "but I'm the first man who ever made a stable out
of a garage." "Who wants to go to town?" demanded Daisy insistently.
Gatsby's eyes floated toward her. "Ah," she cried, "you look so cool." Their
eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an
effort she glanced down at the table. "You always look so cool," she
repeated. She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw. He was
astounded. His mouth opened a little, and he looked at Gatsby, and then back
at Daisy as if he had just recognized her as some one he knew a long time
ago. "You resemble the advertisement of the man," she went on innocently.
"You know the advertisement of the man----" "All right," broke in Tom
quickly, "I'm perfectly willing to go to town. Come on--we're all going to
town." He got up, his eyes still flashing between Gatsby and his wife. No
one moved. "Come on!" His temper cracked a little. "What's the matter,
anyhow? If we're going to town, let's start." His hand, trembling with his
effort at self-control, bore to his lips the last of his glass of ale.
Daisy's voice got us to our feet and out on to the blazing gravel drive.
"Are we just going to go?" she objected. "Like this? Aren't we going to let
any one smoke a cigarette first?" "Everybody smoked all through lunch." "Oh,
let's have fun," she begged him. "It's too hot to fuss." He didn't answer.
"Have it your own way," she said. "Come on, Jordan." They went up-stairs to
get ready while we three men stood there shuffling the hot pebbles with our
feet. A silver curve of the moon hovered already in the western sky. Gatsby
started to speak, changed his mind, but not before Tom wheeled and faced him
expectantly. "Have you got your stables here?" asked Gatsby with an effort.
"About a quarter of a mile down the road." "Oh." A pause. "I don't see the
idea of going to town," broke out Tom savagely. "Women get these notions in
their heads----" "Shall we take anything to drink?" called Daisy from an
upper window. "I'll get some whiskey," answered Tom. He went inside. Gatsby
turned to me rigidly: "I can't say anything in his house, old sport." "She's
got an indiscreet voice," I remarked. "It's full of----" I hesitated. "Her
voice is full of money," he said suddenly. That was it. I'd never understood
before. It was full of money--that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and
fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it. . . . high in a white
palace the king's daughter, the golden girl. . . . Tom came out of the house
wrapping a quart bottle in a towel, followed by Daisy and Jordan wearing
small tight hats of metallic cloth and carrying light capes over their arms.
"Shall we all go in my car?" suggested Gatsby. He felt the hot, green
leather of the seat. "I ought to have left it in the shade." "Is it standard
shift?" demanded Tom. "Yes." "Well, you take my coupe and let me drive your
car to town." The suggestion was distasteful to Gatsby. "I don't think
there's much gas," he objected. "Plenty of gas," said Tom boisterously. He
looked at the gauge. "And if it runs out I can stop at a drug-store. You can
buy anything at a drug-store nowadays." A pause followed this apparently
pointless remark. Daisy looked at Tom frowning, and an indefinable
expression, at once definitely unfamiliar and vaguely recognizable, as if I
had only heard it described in words, passed over Gatsby's face. "Come on,
Daisy," said Tom, pressing her with his hand toward Gatsby's car. "I'll take
you in this circus wagon." He opened the door, but she moved out from the
and then I was in the oil business. But I'm not in either one now." He
looked at me with more attention. "Do you mean you've been thinking over
what I proposed the other night?" Before I could answer, Daisy came out of
the house and two rows of brass buttons on her dress gleamed in the
sunlight. "That huge place THERE?" she cried pointing. "Do you like it?" "I
love it, but I don't see how you live there all alone." "I keep it always
full of interesting people, night and day. People who do interesting things.
Celebrated people." Instead of taking the short cut along the Sound we went
down the road and entered by the big postern. With enchanting murmurs Daisy
admired this aspect or that of the feudal silhouette against the sky,
admired the gardens, the sparkling odor of jonquils and the frothy odor of
hawthorn and plum blossoms and the pale gold odor of kiss-me-at-the-gate. It
was strange to reach the marble steps and find no stir of bright dresses in
and out the door, and hear no sound but bird voices in the trees. And
inside, as we wandered through Marie Antoinette music-rooms and Restoration
salons, I felt that there were guests concealed behind every couch and
table, under orders to be breathlessly silent until we had passed through.
As Gatsby closed the door of "the Merton College Library." I could have
sworn I heard the owl-eyed man break into ghostly laughter. We went
up-stairs, through period bedrooms swathed in rose and lavender silk and
vivid with new flowers, through dressing-rooms and poolrooms, and bathrooms
with sunken baths--intruding into one chamber where a dishevelled man in
pajamas was doing liver exercises on the floor. It was Mr. Klipspringer, the
"boarder." I had seen him wandering hungrily about the beach that morning.
Finally we came to Gatsby's own apartment, a bedroom and a bath, and an Adam
study, where we sat down and drank a glass of some Chartreuse he took from a
cupboard in the wall. He hadn't once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he
revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it
drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his
possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence
none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly toppled down a flight of
stairs. His bedroom was the simplest room of all--except where the dresser
was garnished with a toilet set of pure dull gold. Daisy took the brush with
delight, and smoothed her hair, whereupon Gatsby sat down and shaded his
eyes and began to laugh. "It's the funniest thing, old sport," he said
hilariously. "I can't--When I try to----" He had passed visibly through two
states and was entering upon a third. After his embarrassment and his
unreasoning joy he was consumed with wonder at her presence. He had been
full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with
his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in
the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock. Recovering
himself in a minute he opened for us two hulking patent cabinets which held
his massed suits and dressing-gowns and ties, and his shirts, piled like
bricks in stacks a dozen high. "I've got a man in England who buys me
clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each
season, spring and fall." He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing
them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine
flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in
many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich
heap mounted higher--shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and
apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue.
Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and
began to cry stormily. "They're such beautiful shirts," she sobbed, her
voice muffled in the thick folds. "It makes me sad because I've never seen
such--such beautiful shirts before." After the house, we were to see the
grounds and the swimming-pool, and the hydroplane and the mid-summer
flowers--but outside Gatsby's window it began to rain again, so we stood in
a row looking at the corrugated surface of the Sound. "If it wasn't for the
mist we could see your home across the bay," said Gatsby. "You always have a
green light that burns all night at the end of your dock." Daisy put her arm
through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said.
Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light
had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated
him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had
seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a
dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one. I began to walk
about the room, examining various indefinite objects in the half darkness. A
large photograph of an elderly man in yachting costume attracted me, hung on
the wall over his desk. "Who's this?" "That? That's Mr. Dan Cody, old
sport." The name sounded faintly familiar. "He's dead now. He used to be my
best friend years ago." There was a small picture of Gatsby, also in
yachting costume, on the bureau--Gatsby with his head thrown back
defiantly--taken apparently when he was about eighteen. "I adore it,"
exclaimed Daisy. "The pompadour! You never told me you had a pompadour--or a
yacht." "Look at this," said Gatsby quickly. "Here's a lot of
clippings--about you." They stood side by side examining it. I was going to
ask to see the rubies when the phone rang, and Gatsby took up the receiver.
"Yes. . . . well, I can't talk now. . . . I can't talk now, old sport. . . .
I said a SMALL town. . . . he must know what a small town is. . . . well,
he's no use to us if Detroit is his idea of a small town. . . ." He rang
off. "Come here QUICK!" cried Daisy at the window. The rain was still
falling, but the darkness had parted in the west, and there was a pink and
golden billow of foamy clouds above the sea. "Look at that," she whispered,
and then after a moment: "I'd like to just get one of those pink clouds and
put you in it and push you around." I tried to go then, but they wouldn't
hear of it; perhaps my presence made them feel more satisfactorily alone. "I
know what we'll do," said Gatsby, "we'll have Klipspringer play the piano."
He went out of the room calling "Ewing!" and returned in a few minutes
accompanied by an embarrassed, slightly worn young man, with shell-rimmed
glasses and scanty blond hair. He was now decently clothed in a "sport
shirt," open at the neck, sneakers, and duck trousers of a nebulous hue.
"Did we interrupt your exercises?" inquired Daisy politely. "I was asleep,"
cried Mr. Klipspringer, in a spasm of embarrassment. "That is, I'd BEEN
asleep. Then I got up. . . ." "Klipspringer plays the piano," said Gatsby,
cutting him off. "Don't you, Ewing, old sport?" "I don't play well. I
don't--I hardly play at all. I'm all out of prac----" "We'll go
down-stairs," interrupted Gatsby. He flipped a switch. The gray windows
disappeared as the house glowed full of light. In the music-room Gatsby
turned on a solitary lamp beside the piano. He lit Daisy's cigarette from a
trembling match, and sat down with her on a couch far across the room, where
there was no light save what the gleaming floor bounced in from the hall.
When Klipspringer had played THE LOVE NEST. he turned around on the bench
and searched unhappily for Gatsby in the gloom. "I'm all out of practice,
you see. I told you I couldn't play. I'm all out of prac----" "Don't talk so
much, old sport," commanded Gatsby. "Play!" "IN THE MORNING, IN THE EVENING,
AIN'T WE GOT FUN----" Outside the wind was loud and there was a faint flow
of thunder along the Sound. All the lights were going on in West Egg now;
the electric trains, men-carrying, were plunging home through the rain from
New York. It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was
generating on the air. "ONE THING'S SURE AND NOTHING'S SURER THE RICH GET
RICHER AND THE POOR GET--CHILDREN. IN THE MEANTIME, IN BETWEEN TIME----" As
I went over to say good-by I saw that the expression of bewilderment had
come back into Gatsby's face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as
to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have
been moments even that afternoon whe Daisy tumbled short of his dreams--not
through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.
It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it
with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with
every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness
can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart. As I watched
him he adjusted himself a little, visibly. His hand took hold of hers, and
as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of
emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish
warmth, because it couldn't be over-dreamed--that voice was a deathless
song. They had forgotten me, but Daisy glanced up and held out her hand;
Gatsby didn't know me now at all. I looked once more at them and they looked
back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life. Then I went out of the room
and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them there together.
Chapter 6 About this time an ambitious young reporter from New York arrived
one morning at Gatsby's door and asked him if he had anything to say.
"Anything to say about what?" inquired Gatsby politely. "Why--any statement
to give out." It transpired after a confused five minutes that the man had
heard Gatsby's name around his office in a connection which he either
wouldn't reveal or didn't fully understand. This was his day off and with
laudable initiative he had hurried out "to see." It was a random shot, and
yet the reporter's instinct was right. Gatsby's notoriety, spread about by
the hundreds who had accepted his hospitality and so become authorities on
his past, had increased all summer until he fell just short of being news.
Contemporary legends such as the "underground pipe-line to Canada." attached
themselves to him, and there was one persistent story that he didn't live in
a house at all, but in a boat that looked like a house and was moved
secretly up and down the Long Island shore. Just why these inventions were a
source of satisfaction to James Gatz of North Dakota, isn't easy to say.
James Gatz--that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed
it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the
beginning of his career--when he saw Dan Cody's yacht drop anchor over the
most insidious flat on Lake Superior. It was James Gatz who had been loafing
along the beach that afternoon in a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas
pants, but it was already Jay Gatsby who borrowed a rowboat, pulled out to
the TUOLOMEE, and informed Cody that a wind might catch him and break him up
in half an hour. I suppose he'd had the name ready for a long time, even
then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people--his
imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth
was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic
conception of himself. He was a son of God--a phrase which, if it means
anything, means just that--and he must be about His Father's business, the
service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the
sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent,
and to this conception he was faithful to the end. For over a year he had
been beating his way along the south shore of Lake Superior as a clam-digger
and a salmon-fisher or in any other capacity that brought him food and bed.
His brown, hardening body lived naturally through the half-fierce, half-lazy
work of the bracing days. He knew women early, and since they spoiled him he
became contemptuous of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of
the others because they were hysterical about things which in his
overwhelming self-absorbtion he took for granted. But his heart was in a
constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted
him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out
in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked
with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to
the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid
scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an
outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality
of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a
fairy's wing. An instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months
before, to the small Lutheran college of St. Olaf in southern Minnesota. He
stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums
of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor's work with
which he was to pay his way through. Then he drifted back to Lake Superior,
and he was still searching for something to do on the day that Dan Cody's
yacht dropped anchor in the shallows alongshore. Cody was fifty years old
then, a product of the Nevada silver fields, of the Yukon, of every rush for
metal since seventy-five. The transactions in Montana copper that made him
many times a millionaire found him physically robust but on the verge of
soft-mindedness, and, suspecting this, an infinite number of women tried to
separate him from his money. The none too savory ramifications by which Ella
Kaye, the newspaper woman, played Madame de Maintenon to his weakness and
sent him to sea in a yacht, were common knowledge to the turgid
sub-journalism of 1902. He had been coasting along all too hospitable shores
for five years when he turned up as James Gatz's destiny at Little Girls
Point. To the young Gatz, resting on his oars and looking up at the railed
deck, the yacht represented all the beauty and glamour in the world. I
suppose he smiled at Cody--he had probably discovered that people liked him
when he smiled. At any rate Cody asked him a few questions (one of them
elicited the brand new name) and found that he was quick and extravagantly
ambitious. A few days later he took him to Duluth and bought him a blue
coat, six pair of white duck trousers, and a yachting cap. And when the
TUOLOMEE left for the West Indies and the Barbary Coast Gatsby left too. He
was employed in a vague personal capacity--while he remained with Cody he
was in turn steward, mate, skipper, secretary, and even jailor, for Dan Cody
sober knew what lavish doings Dan Cody drunk might soon be about, and he
provided for such contingencies by reposing more and more trust in Gatsby.
The arrangement lasted five years, during which the boat went three times
around the Continent. It might have lasted indefinitely except for the fact
that Ella Kaye came on board one night in Boston and a week later Dan Cody
inhospitably died. I remember the portrait of him up in Gatsby's bedroom, a
gray, florid man with a hard, empty face--the pioneer debauchee, who during
one phase of American life brought back to the Eastern seaboard the savage
violence of the frontier brothel and saloon. It was indirectly due to Cody
that Gatsby drank so little. Sometimes in the course of gay parties women
used to rub champagne into his hair; for himself he formed the habit of
letting liquor alone. And it was from Cody that he inherited money--a legacy
of twenty-five thousand dollars. He didn't get it. He never understood the
legal device that was used against him, but what remained of the millions
went intact to Ella Kaye. He was left with his singularly appropriate
education; the vague contour of Jay Gatsby had filled out to the
substantiality of a man. He told me all this very much later, but I've put
it down here with the idea of exploding those first wild rumors about his
antecedents, which weren't even faintly true. Moreover he told it to me at a
time of confusion, when I had reached the point of believing everything and
nothing about him. So I take advantage of this short halt, while Gatsby, so
to speak, caught his breath, to clear this set of misconceptions away. It
was a halt, too, in my association with his affairs. For several weeks I
didn't see him or hear his voice on the phone--mostly I was in New York,
trotting around with Jordan and trying to ingratiate myself with her senile
aunt--but finally I went over to his house one Sunday afternoon. I hadn't
been there two minutes when somebody brought Tom Buchanan in for a drink. I
was startled, naturally, but the really surprising thing was that it hadn't
happened before. They were a party of three on horseback--Tom and a man
named Sloane and a pretty woman in a brown riding-habit, who had been there
previously. "I'm delighted to see you," said Gatsby, standing on his porch.
"I'm delighted that you dropped in." As though they cared! "Sit right down.
Have a cigarette or a cigar." He walked around the room quickly, ringing
bells. "I'll have something to drink for you in just a minute." He was
profoundly affected by the fact that Tom was there. But he would be uneasy
anyhow until he had given them something, realizing in a vague way that that
was all they came for. Mr. Sloane wanted nothing. A lemonade? No, thanks. A
little champagne? Nothing at all, thanks. . . . I'm sorry---- "Did you have
a nice ride?" "Very good roads around here." "I suppose the automobiles----"
"Yeah." Moved by an irresistible impulse, Gatsby turned to Tom, who had
accepted the introduction as a stranger. "I believe we've met somewhere
before, Mr. Buchanan." "Oh, yes," said Tom, gruffly polite, but obviously
not remembering. "So we did. I remember very well." "About two weeks ago."
"That's right. You were with Nick here." "I know your wife," continued
Gatsby, almost aggressively. "That so?" Tom turned to me. "You live near
here, Nick?" "Next door." "That so?" Mr. Sloane didn't enter into the
conversation, but lounged back haughtily in his chair; the woman said
nothing either--until unexpectedly, after two highballs, she became cordial.
"We'll all come over to your next party, Mr. Gatsby," she suggested. "What
do you say?" "Certainly; I'd be delighted to have you." "Be ver' nice," said
Mr. Sloane, without gratitude. "Well--think ought to be starting home."
"Please don't hurry," Gatsby urged them. He had control of himself now, and
he wanted to see more of Tom. "Why don't you--why don't you stay for supper?
I wouldn't be surprised if some other people dropped in from New York." "You
come to supper with ME," said the lady enthusiastically. "Both of you." This
included me. Mr. Sloane got to his feet. "Come along," he said--but to her
only. "I mean it," she insisted. "I'd love to have you. Lots of room."
Gatsby looked at me questioningly. He wanted to go, and he didn't see that
Mr. Sloane had determined he shouldn't. "I'm afraid I won't be able to," I
said. "Well, you come," she urged, concentrating on Gatsby. Mr. Sloane
murmured something close to her ear. "We won't be late if we start now," she
insisted aloud. "I haven't got a horse," said Gatsby. "I used to ride in the
army, but I've never bought a horse. I'll have to follow you in my car.
Excuse me for just a minute." The rest of us walked out on the porch, where
Sloane and the lady began an impassioned conversation aside. "My God, I
believe the man's coming," said Tom. "Doesn't he know she doesn't want him?"
"She says she does want him." "She has a big dinner party and he won't know
a soul there." He frowned. "I wonder where in the devil he met Daisy. By
God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these
days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish." Suddenly Mr. Sloane and
the lady walked down the steps and mounted their horses. "Come on," said Mr.
Sloane to Tom, "we're late. We've got to go." And then to me: "Tell him we
couldn't wait, will you?" Tom and I shook hands, the rest of us exchanged a
cool nod, and they trotted quickly down the drive, disappearing under the
August foliage just as Gatsby, with hat and light overcoat in hand, came out
the front door. Tom was evidently perturbed at Daisy's running around alone,
for on the following Saturday night he came with her to Gatsby's party.
Perhaps his presence gave the evening its peculiar quality of
oppressiveness--it stands out in my memory from Gatsby's other parties that
summer. There were the same people, or at least the same sort of people, the
same profusion of champagne, the same many-colored, many-keyed commotion,
but I felt an unpleasantness in the air, a pervading harshness that hadn't
been there before. Or perhaps I had merely grown used to it, grown to accept
West Egg as a world complete in itself, with its own standards and its own
great figures, second to nothing because it had no consciousness of being
so, and now I was looking at it again, through Daisy's eyes. It is
invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have
expended your own powers of adjustment. They arrived at twilight, and, as we
strolled out among the sparkling hundreds, Daisy's voice was playing
murmurous tricks in her throat. "These things excite me so," she whispered.
"If you want to kiss me any time during the evening, Nick, just let me know
and I'll be glad to arrange it for you. Just mention my name. Or present a
green card. I'm giving out green----" "Look around," suggested Gatsby. "I'm
looking around. I'm having a marvelous----" "You must see the faces of many
people you've heard about." Tom's arrogant eyes roamed the crowd. "We don't
go around very much," he said. "In fact, I was just thinking I don't know a
soul here." "Perhaps you know that lady." Gatsby indicated a gorgeous,
scarcely human orchid of a woman who sat in state under a white plum tree.
Tom and Daisy stared, with that peculiarly unreal feeling that accompanies
the recognition of a hitherto ghostly celebrity of the movies. "She's
lovely," said Daisy. "The man bending over her is her director." He took
them ceremoniously from group to group: "Mrs. Buchanan . . . and Mr.
Buchanan----" After an instant's hesitation he added: "the polo player." "Oh
no," objected Tom quickly, "not me." But evidently the sound of it pleased
Gatsby, for Tom remained "the polo player." for the rest of the evening.
"I've never met so many celebrities!" Daisy exclaimed. "I liked that
man--what was his name?--with the sort of blue nose." Gatsby identified him,
adding that he was a small producer. "Well, I liked him anyhow." "I'd a
little rather not be the polo player," said Tom pleasantly, "I'd rather look
at all these famous people in--in oblivion." Daisy and Gatsby danced. I
remember being surprised by his graceful, conservative fox-trot--I had never
seen him dance before. Then they sauntered over to my house and sat on the
steps for half an hour, while at her request I remained watchfully in the
garden. "In case there's a fire or a flood," she explained, "or any act of
God." Tom appeared from his oblivion as we were sitting down to supper
together. "Do you mind if I eat with some people over here?" he said. "A
fellow's getting off some funny stuff." "Go ahead," answered Daisy genially,
"and if you want to take down any addresses here's my little gold pencil." .
. . she looked around after a moment and told me the girl was "common but
pretty," and I knew that except for the half-hour she'd been alone with
Gatsby she wasn't having a good time. We were at a particularly tipsy table.
That was my fault--Gatsby had been called to the phone, and I'd enjoyed
these same people only two weeks before. But what had amused me then turned
septic on the air now. "How do you feel, Miss Baedeker?" The girl addressed
was trying, unsuccessfully, to slump against my shoulder. At this inquiry
she sat up and opened her eyes. "Wha'?" A massive and lethargic woman, who
had been urging Daisy to play golf with her at the local club to-morrow,
spoke in Miss Baedeker's defence: "Oh, she's all right now. When she's had
five or six cocktails she always starts screaming like that. I tell her she
ought to leave it alone." "I do leave it alone," affirmed the accused
hollowly. "We heard you yelling, so I said to Doc Civet here: 'There's
somebody that needs your help, Doc.'" "She's much obliged, I'm sure," said
another friend, without gratitude. "But you got her dress all wet when you
stuck her head in the pool." "Anything I hate is to get my head stuck in a
pool," mumbled Miss Baedeker. "They almost drowned me once over in New
Jersey." "Then you ought to leave it alone," countered Doctor Civet. "Speak
for yourself!" cried Miss Baedeker violently. "Your hand shakes. I wouldn't
let you operate on me!" It was like that. Almost the last thing I remember
was standing with Daisy and watching the moving-picture director and his
Star. They were still under the white plum tree and their faces were
touching except for a pale, thin ray of moonlight between. It occurred to me
that he had been very slowly bending toward her all evening to attain this
proximity, and even while I watched I saw him stoop one ultimate degree and
kiss at her cheek. "I like her," said Daisy, "I think she's lovely." But the
rest offended her--and inarguably, because it wasn't a gesture but an
emotion. She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented "place." that
Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village--appalled by its
raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate
that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She
saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand. I sat
on the front steps with them while they waited for their car. It was dark
here in front; only the bright door sent ten square feet of light volleying
out into the soft black morning. Sometimes a shadow moved against a
dressing-room blind above, gave way to another shadow, an indefinite
procession of shadows, who rouged and powdered in an invisible glass. "Who
is this Gatsby anyhow?" demanded Tom suddenly. "Some big bootlegger?"
"Where'd you hear that?" I inquired. "I didn't hear it. I imagined it. A lot
of these newly rich people are just big bootleggers, you know." "Not
Gatsby," I said shortly. He was silent for a moment. The pebbles of the
drive crunched under his feet. "Well, he certainly must have strained
himself to get this menagerie together." A breeze stirred the gray haze of
Daisy's fur collar. "At least they're more interesting than the people we
know," she said with an effort. "You didn't look so interested." "Well, I
was." Tom laughed and turned to me. "Did you notice Daisy's face when that
girl asked her to put her under a cold shower?" Daisy began to sing with the
music in a husky, rhythmic whisper, bringing out a meaning in each word that
it had never had before and would never have again. When the melody rose,
her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have,
and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.
"Lots of people come who haven't been invited," she said suddenly. "That
girl hadn't been invited. They simply force their way in and he's too polite
to object." "I'd like to know who he is and what he does," insisted Tom.
"And I think I'll make a point of finding out." "I can tell you right now,"
she answered. "He owned some drug-stores, a lot of drug-stores. He built
them up himself." The dilatory limousine came rolling up the drive. "Good
night, Nick," said Daisy. Her glance left me and sought the lighted top of
the steps, where THREE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING, a neat, sad little waltz of
that year, was drifting out the open door. After all, in the very casualness
of Gatsby's party there were romantic possibilities totally absent from her
world. What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling her back
inside? What would happen now in the dim, incalculable hours? Perhaps some
unbelievable guest would arrive, a person infinitely rare and to be
marvelled at, some authentically radiant young girl who with one fresh
glance at Gatsby, one moment of magical encounter, would blot out those five
years of unwavering devotion. I stayed late that night, Gatsby asked me to
wait until he was free, and I lingered in the garden until the inevitable
swimming party had run up, chilled and exalted, from the black beach, until
the lights were extinguished in the guest-rooms overhead. When he came down
the steps at last the tanned skin was drawn unusually tight on his face, and
his eyes were bright and tired. "She didn't like it," he said immediately.
"Of course she did." "She didn't like it," he insisted. "She didn't have a
good time." He was silent, and I guessed at his unutterable depression. "I
feel far away from her," he said. "It's hard to make her understand." "You
mean about the dance?" "The dance?" He dismissed all the dances he had given
with a snap of his fingers. "Old sport, the dance is unimportant." He wanted
nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: "I never loved
you." After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could
decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that,
after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from
her house--just as if it were five years ago. "And she doesn't understand,"
he said. "She used to be able to understand. We'd sit for hours----" He
broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and
discarded favors and crushed flowers. "I wouldn't ask too much of her," I
ventured. "You can't repeat the past." "Can't repeat the past?" he cried
incredulously. "Why of course you can!" He looked around him wildly, as if
the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of
his hand. "I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before," he said,
nodding determinedly. "She'll see." He talked a lot about the past, and I
gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps,
that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered
since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go
over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was. . . . . . . One
autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when
the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees
and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned
toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement
in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the
houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle
among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of
the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the
trees--he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could
suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. His
heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He
knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions
to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of
God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had
been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she
blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. Through
all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of
something--an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard
somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my
mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more
struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound,
and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever. Chapter 7 It
was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights in his
house failed to go on one Saturday night--and, as obscurely as it had begun,
his career as Trimalchio was over. Only gradually did I become aware that
the automobiles which turned expectantly into his drive stayed for just a
minute and then drove sulkily away. Wondering if he were sick I went over to
find out--an unfamiliar butler with a villainous face squinted at me
suspiciously from the door. "Is Mr. Gatsby sick?" "Nope." After a pause he
added "sir." in a dilatory, grudging way. "I hadn't seen him around, and I
was rather worried. Tell him Mr. Carraway came over." "Who?" he demanded
rudely. "Carraway." "Carraway. All right, I'll tell him." Abruptly he
slammed the door. My Finn informed me that Gatsby had dismissed every
servant in his house a week ago and replaced them with half a dozen others,
who never went into West Egg Village to be bribed by the tradesmen, but
ordered moderate supplies over the telephone. The grocery boy reported that
the kitchen looked like a pigsty, and the general opinion in the village was
that the new people weren't servants at all. Next day Gatsby called me on
the phone. "Going away?" I inquired. "No, old sport." "I hear you fired all
your servants." "I wanted somebody who wouldn't gossip. Daisy comes over
quite often--in the afternoons." So the whole caravansary had fallen in like
a card house at the disapproval in her eyes. "They're some people Wolfshiem
wanted to do something for. They're all brothers and sisters. They used to
run a small hotel." "I see." He was calling up at Daisy's request--would I
come to lunch at her house to-morrow? Miss Baker would be there. Half an
hour later Daisy herself telephoned and seemed relieved to find that I was
coming. Something was up. And yet I couldn't believe that they would choose
this occasion for a scene--especially for the rather harrowing scene that
Gatsby had outlined in the garden. The next day was broiling, almost the
last, certainly the warmest, of the summer. As my train emerged from the
tunnel into sunlight, only the hot whistles of the National Biscuit Company
broke the simmering hush at noon. The straw seats of the car hovered on the
edge of combustion; the woman next to me perspired delicately for a while
into her white shirtwaist, and then, as her newspaper dampened under her
fingers, lapsed despairingly into deep heat with a desolate cry. Her
pocket-book slapped to the floor. "Oh, my!" she gasped. I picked it up with
a weary bend and handed it back to her, holding it at arm's length and by
the extreme tip of the corners to indicate that I had no designs upon
it--but every one near by, including the woman, suspected me just the same.
"Hot!" said the conductor to familiar faces. "Some weather! hot! hot! hot!
Is it hot enough for you? Is it hot? Is it . . . ?" My commutation ticket
came back to me with a dark stain from his hand. That any one should care in
this heat whose flushed lips he kissed, whose head made damp the pajama
pocket over his heart! . . . Through the hall of the Buchanans' house blew a
faint wind, carrying the sound of the telephone bell out to Gatsby and me as
we waited at the door. "The master's body!" roared the butler into the
mouthpiece. "I'm sorry, madame, but we can't furnish it--it's far too hot to
touch this noon!" What he really said was: "Yes . . . yes . . . I'll see."
He set down the receiver and came toward us, glistening slightly, to take
our stiff straw hats. "Madame expects you in the salon!" he cried,
needlessly indicating the direction. In this heat every extra gesture was an
affront to the common store of life. The room, shadowed well with awnings,
was dark and cool. Daisy and Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver
idols weighing down their own white dresses against the singing breeze of
the fans. "We can't move," they said together. Jordan's fingers, powdered
white over their tan, rested for a moment in mine. "And Mr. Thomas Buchanan,
the athlete?" I inquired. Simultaneously I heard his voice, gruff, muffled,
husky, at the hall telephone. Gatsby stood in the centre of the crimson
carpet and gazed around with fascinated eyes. Daisy watched him and laughed,
her sweet, exciting laugh; a tiny gust of powder rose from her bosom into
the air. "The rumor is," whispered Jordan, "that that's Tom's girl on the
telephone." We were silent. The voice in the hall rose high with annoyance:
"Very well, then, I won't sell you the car at all. . . . I'm under no
obligations to you at all . . . and as for your bothering me about it at
lunch time, I won't stand that at all!" "Holding down the receiver," said
Daisy cynically. "No, he's not," I assured her. "It's a bona-fide deal. I
happen to know about it." Tom flung open the door, blocked out its space for
a moment with his thick body, and hurried into the room. "Mr. Gatsby!" He
put out his broad, flat hand with well-concealed dislike. "I'm glad to see
you, sir. . . . Nick. . . ." "Make us a cold drink," cried Daisy. As he left
the room again she got up and went over to Gatsby and pulled his face down,
kissing him on the mouth. "You know I love you," she murmured. "You forget
there's a lady present," said Jordan. Daisy looked around doubtfully. "You
kiss Nick too." "What a low, vulgar girl!" "I don't care!" cried Daisy, and
began to clog on the brick fireplace. Then she remembered the heat and sat
down guiltily on the couch just as a freshly laundered nurse leading a
little girl came into the room. "Bles-sed pre-cious," she crooned, holding
out her arms. "Come to your own mother that loves you." The child,
relinquished by the nurse, rushed across the room and rooted shyly into her
mother's dress. "The bles-sed pre-cious! Did mother get powder on your old
yellowy hair? Stand up now, and say--How-de-do." Gatsby and I in turn leaned
down and took the small, reluctant hand. Afterward he kept looking at the
child with surprise. I don't think he had ever really believed in its
existence before. "I got dressed before luncheon," said the child, turning
eagerly to Daisy. "That's because your mother wanted to show you off." Her
face bent into the single wrinkle of the small, white neck. "You dream, you.
You absolute little dream." "Yes," admitted the child calmly. "Aunt Jordan's
got on a white dress too." "How do you like mother's friends?" Daisy turned
her around so that she faced Gatsby. "Do you think they're pretty?" "Where's
Daddy?" "She doesn't look like her father," explained Daisy. "She looks like
me. She's got my hair and shape of the face." Daisy sat back upon the couch.
The nurse took a step forward and held out her hand. "Come, Pammy."
"Good-by, sweetheart!" With a reluctant backward glance the well-disciplined
child held to her nurse's hand and was pulled out the door, just as Tom came
back, preceding four gin rickeys that clicked full of ice. Gatsby took up
his drink. "They certainly look cool," he said, with visible tension. We
drank in long, greedy swallows. "I read somewhere that the sun's getting
hotter every year," said Tom genially. "It seems that pretty soon the
earth's going to fall into the sun--or wait a minute--it's just the
opposite--the sun's getting colder every year. "Come outside," he suggested
to Gatsby, "I'd like you to have a look at the place." I went with them out
to the veranda. On the green Sound, stagnant in the heat, one small sail
crawled slowly toward the fresher sea. Gatsby's eyes followed it
momentarily; he raised his hand and pointed across the bay. "I'm right
across from you." "So you are." Our eyes lifted over the rose-beds and the
hot lawn and the weedy refuse of the dog-days along-shore. Slowly the white
wings of the boat moved against the blue cool limit of the sky. Ahead lay
the scalloped ocean and the abounding blessed isles. "There's sport for
you," said Tom, nodding. "I'd like to be out there with him for about an
hour." We had luncheon in the dining-room, darkened too against the heat,
and drank down nervous gayety with the cold ale. "What'll we do with
ourselves this afternoon?" cried Daisy, "and the day after that, and the
next thirty years?" "Don't be morbid," Jordan said. "Life starts all over
again when it gets crisp in the fall." "But it's so hot," insisted Daisy, on
the verge of tears, "and everything's so confused. Let's all go to town!"
Her voice struggled on through the heat, beating against it, molding its
senselessness into forms. "I've heard of making a garage out of a stable,"
Tom was saying to Gatsby, "but I'm the first man who ever made a stable out
of a garage." "Who wants to go to town?" demanded Daisy insistently.
Gatsby's eyes floated toward her. "Ah," she cried, "you look so cool." Their
eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an
effort she glanced down at the table. "You always look so cool," she
repeated. She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw. He was
astounded. His mouth opened a little, and he looked at Gatsby, and then back
at Daisy as if he had just recognized her as some one he knew a long time
ago. "You resemble the advertisement of the man," she went on innocently.
"You know the advertisement of the man----" "All right," broke in Tom
quickly, "I'm perfectly willing to go to town. Come on--we're all going to
town." He got up, his eyes still flashing between Gatsby and his wife. No
one moved. "Come on!" His temper cracked a little. "What's the matter,
anyhow? If we're going to town, let's start." His hand, trembling with his
effort at self-control, bore to his lips the last of his glass of ale.
Daisy's voice got us to our feet and out on to the blazing gravel drive.
"Are we just going to go?" she objected. "Like this? Aren't we going to let
any one smoke a cigarette first?" "Everybody smoked all through lunch." "Oh,
let's have fun," she begged him. "It's too hot to fuss." He didn't answer.
"Have it your own way," she said. "Come on, Jordan." They went up-stairs to
get ready while we three men stood there shuffling the hot pebbles with our
feet. A silver curve of the moon hovered already in the western sky. Gatsby
started to speak, changed his mind, but not before Tom wheeled and faced him
expectantly. "Have you got your stables here?" asked Gatsby with an effort.
"About a quarter of a mile down the road." "Oh." A pause. "I don't see the
idea of going to town," broke out Tom savagely. "Women get these notions in
their heads----" "Shall we take anything to drink?" called Daisy from an
upper window. "I'll get some whiskey," answered Tom. He went inside. Gatsby
turned to me rigidly: "I can't say anything in his house, old sport." "She's
got an indiscreet voice," I remarked. "It's full of----" I hesitated. "Her
voice is full of money," he said suddenly. That was it. I'd never understood
before. It was full of money--that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and
fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it. . . . high in a white
palace the king's daughter, the golden girl. . . . Tom came out of the house
wrapping a quart bottle in a towel, followed by Daisy and Jordan wearing
small tight hats of metallic cloth and carrying light capes over their arms.
"Shall we all go in my car?" suggested Gatsby. He felt the hot, green
leather of the seat. "I ought to have left it in the shade." "Is it standard
shift?" demanded Tom. "Yes." "Well, you take my coupe and let me drive your
car to town." The suggestion was distasteful to Gatsby. "I don't think
there's much gas," he objected. "Plenty of gas," said Tom boisterously. He
looked at the gauge. "And if it runs out I can stop at a drug-store. You can
buy anything at a drug-store nowadays." A pause followed this apparently
pointless remark. Daisy looked at Tom frowning, and an indefinable
expression, at once definitely unfamiliar and vaguely recognizable, as if I
had only heard it described in words, passed over Gatsby's face. "Come on,
Daisy," said Tom, pressing her with his hand toward Gatsby's car. "I'll take
you in this circus wagon." He opened the door, but she moved out from the