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Chapter 1 In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me
some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you
feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the
people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." He didn't
say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved
way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In
consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened
up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few
veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to
this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that
in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy
to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were
unsought--frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile
levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation
was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or
at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and
marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite
hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as
my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the
fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth. And, after
boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a
limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after
a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the
East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a
sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with
privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his
name to this book, was exempt from my reaction--Gatsby, who represented
everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an
unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous
about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he
were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes
ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that
flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative
temperament."--it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness
such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I
shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is
what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that
temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded
elations of men. My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this
Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a
clan, and we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of
Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother,
who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started
the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on to-day. I never
saw this great-uncle, but I'm supposed to look like him--with special
reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father's office I
graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my
father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration
known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came
back restless. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle
West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe--so I decided to go
East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business,
so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles
talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally
said, "Why--ye--es," with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to
finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I
thought, in the spring of twenty-two. The practical thing was to find rooms
in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide
lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that
we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea.
He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month,
but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to
the country alone. I had a dog--at least I had him for a few days until he
ran away--and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked
breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove. It
was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived
than I, stopped me on the road. "How do you get to West Egg village?" he
asked helplessly. I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I
was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on
me the freedom of the neighborhood. And so with the sunshine and the great
bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I
had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the
summer. There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to
be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes
on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf
in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the
shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the
high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in
college--one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for
the "Yale News."--and now I was going to bring back all such things into my
life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the
"well-rounded man." This isn't just an epigram--life is much more
successfully looked at from a single window, after all. It was a matter of
chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities
in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself
due east of New York--and where there are, among other natural curiosities,
two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of
enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay,
jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western
hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. they are not
perfect ovals--like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed
flat at the contact end--but their physical resemblance must be a source of
perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. to the wingless a more
arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape
and size. I lived at West Egg, the--well, the less fashionable of the two,
though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a
little sinister contrast between them. my house was at the very tip of the
egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places
that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. the one on my right was
a colossal affair by any standard--it was a factual imitation of some Hotel
de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin
beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of
lawn and garden. it was Gatsby's mansion. Or, rather, as I didn't know Mr.
Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house
was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I
had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the
consoling proximity of millionaires--all for eighty dollars a month. Across
the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along
the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I
drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second
cousin once removed, and I'd known Tom in college. And just after the war I
spent two days with them in Chicago. Her husband, among various physical
accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played
football at New Haven--a national figure in a way, one of those men who
reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything
afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy--even in
college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach--but now he'd left
Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for
instance, he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. it was
hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do
that. Why they came East I don't know. They had spent a year in France for
no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever
people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said
Daisy over the telephone, but I didn't believe it--I had no sight into
Daisy's heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little
wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.
And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to
see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more
elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial
mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward
the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick
walks and burning gardens--finally when it reached the house drifting up the
side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was
broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide
open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was
standing with his legs apart on the front porch. He had changed since his
New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a
rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had
established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always
leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding
clothes could hide the enormous power of that body--he seemed to fill those
glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great
pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was
a body capable of enormous leverage--a cruel body. His speaking voice, a
gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed.
There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he
liked--and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts. "Now, don't
think my opinion on these matters is final," he seemed to say, "just because
I'm stronger and more of a man than you are." We were in the same senior
society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that
he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant
wistfulness of his own. We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.
"I've got a nice place here," he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.
Turning me around by one arm, he moved a broad flat hand along the front
vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep,
pungent roses, and a snub-nosed motor-boat that bumped the tide offshore.
"It belonged to Demaine, the oil man." He turned me around again, politely
and abruptly. "We'll go inside." We walked through a high hallway into a
bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows
at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh
grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew
through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale
flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and
then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does
on the sea. The only completely stationary object in the room was an
enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an
anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling
and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight
around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip
and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there
was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died
out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women
ballooned slowly to the floor. The younger of the two was a stranger to me.
She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless,
and with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it
which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes
she gave no hint of it--indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an
apology for having disturbed her by coming in. The other girl, Daisy, made
an attempt to rise--she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious
expression--then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I
laughed too and came forward into the room. "I'm p-paralyzed with
happiness." She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held
my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no
one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She
hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I've
heard it said that Daisy's murmur was only to make people lean toward her;
an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.) At any rate, Miss
Baker's lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly, and then
quickly tipped her head back again--the object she was balancing had
obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a
sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete
self-sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me. I looked back at my
cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was
the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an
arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and
lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth,
but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her
found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a
promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that
there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour. I told her how I
had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way East, and how a dozen people
had sent their love through me. "Do they miss me?" she cried ecstatically.
"The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted
black as a mourning wreath, and there's a persistent wail all night along
the north shore." "How gorgeous! Let's go back, Tom. To-morrow!" Then she
added irrelevantly: "You ought to see the baby." "I'd like to." "She's
asleep. She's three years old. Haven't you ever seen her?" "Never." "Well,
you ought to see her. She's----" Tom Buchanan, who had been hovering
restlessly about the room, stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder. "What
you doing, Nick?" "I'm a bond man." "Who with?" I told him. "Never heard of
them," he remarked decisively. This annoyed me. "You will," I answered
shortly. "You will if you stay in the East." "Oh, I'll stay in the East,
don't you worry," he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he
were alert for something more. "I'd be a God damned fool to live anywhere
else." At this point Miss Baker said: "Absolutely!" with such suddenness
that I started--it was the first word she uttered since I came into the
room. Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and
with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room. "I'm stiff,"
she complained, "I've been lying on that sofa for as long as I can
remember." "Don't look at me," Daisy retorted, "I've been trying to get you
to New York all afternoon." "No, thanks," said Miss Baker to the four
cocktails just in from the pantry, "I'm absolutely in training." Her host
looked at her incredulously. "You are!" He took down his drink as if it were
a drop in the bottom of a glass. "How you ever get anything done is beyond
me." I looked at Miss Baker, wondering what it was she "got done." I enjoyed
looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect
carriage, which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the
shoulders like a young cadet. Her gray sun-strained eyes looked back at me
with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming, discontented face.
It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere
before. "You live in West Egg," she remarked contemptuously. "I know
somebody there." "I don't know a single----" "You must know Gatsby."
"Gatsby?" demanded Daisy. "What Gatsby?" Before I could reply that he was my
neighbor dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under
mine, Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a
checker to another square. Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on
their hips, the two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch,
open toward the sunset, where four candles flickered on the table in the
diminished wind. "Why CANDLES?" objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them
out with her fingers. "In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year."
She looked at us all radiantly. "Do you always watch for the longest day of
the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year
and then miss it." "We ought to plan something," yawned Miss Baker, sitting
down at the table as if she were getting into bed. "All right," said Daisy.
"What'll we plan?" She turned to me helplessly: "What do people plan?"
Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her
little finger. "Look!" she complained; "I hurt it." We all looked--the
knuckle was black and blue. "You did it, Tom," she said accusingly. "I know
you didn't mean to, but you DID do it. That's what I get for marrying a
brute of a man, a great, big, hulking physical specimen of a----" "I hate
that word hulking," objected Tom crossly, "even in kidding." "Hulking,"
insisted Daisy. Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively
and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as
cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all
desire. They were here, and they accepted Tom and me, making only a polite
pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that presently
dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and
casually put away. It was sharply different from the West, where an evening
was hurried from phase to phase toward its close, in a continually
disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment
itself. "You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy," I confessed on my second
glass of corky but rather impressive claret. "Can't you talk about crops or
something?" I meant nothing in particular by this remark, but it was taken
up in an unexpected way. "Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom
violently. "I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you
read 'The Rise of the Colored Empires' by this man Goddard?" "Why, no," I
answered, rather surprised by his tone. "Well, it's a fine book, and
everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race
will be--will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been
proved." "Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy, with an expression of
unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them. What was
that word we----" "Well, these books are all scientific," insisted Tom,
glancing at her impatiently. "This fellow has worked out the whole thing.
It's up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races
will have control of things." "We've got to beat them down," whispered
Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun. "You ought to live in
California--" began Miss Baker, but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily
in his chair. "This idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are, and you
are, and----" After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a
slight nod, and she winked at me again. "--And we've produced all the things
that go to make civilization--oh, science and art, and all that. Do you
see?" There was something pathetic in his concentration, as if his
complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more. When,
almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch
Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned toward me. "I'll
tell you a family secret," she whispered enthusiastically. "It's about the
butler's nose. Do you want to hear about the butler's nose?" "That's why I
came over to-night." "Well, he wasn't always a butler; he used to be the
silver polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service for
two hundred people. He had to polish it from morning till night, until
finally it began to affect his nose----" "Things went from bad to worse,"
suggested Miss Baker. "Yes. Things went from bad to worse, until finally he
had to give up his position." For a moment the last sunshine fell with
romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward
breathlessly as I listened--then the glow faded, each light deserting her
with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk. The
butler came back and murmured something close to Tom's ear, whereupon Tom
frowned, pushed back his chair, and without a word went inside. As if his
absence quickened something within her, Daisy leaned forward again, her
voice glowing and singing. "I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind
me of a--of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn't he?" She turned to Miss Baker
for confirmation: "An absolute rose?" This was untrue. I am not even faintly
like a rose. She was only extemporizing, but a stirring warmth flowed from
her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those
breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table
and excused herself and went into the house. Miss Baker and I exchanged a
short glance consciously devoid of meaning. I was about to speak when she
sat up alertly and said "Sh!" in a warning voice. A subdued impassioned
murmur was audible in the room beyond, and Miss Baker leaned forward
unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence,
sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether. "This Mr. Gatsby
you spoke of is my neighbor----" I said. "Don't talk. I want to hear what
happens." "Is something happening?" I inquired innocently. "You mean to say
you don't know?" said Miss Baker, honestly surprised. "I thought everybody
knew." "I don't." "Why----" she said hesitantly, "Tom's got some woman in
New York." "Got some woman?" I repeated blankly. Miss Baker nodded. "She
might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner time. Don't you
think?" Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a
dress and the crunch of leather boots, and Tom and Daisy were back at the
table. "It couldn't be helped!" cried Daisy with tense gaiety. She sat down,
glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me, and continued: "I looked
outdoors for a minute, and it's very romantic outdoors. There's a bird on
the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White
Star Line. He's singing away----" Her voice sang: "It's romantic, isn't it,
Tom?" "Very romantic," he said, and then miserably to me: "If it's light
enough after dinner, I want to take you down to the stables." The telephone
rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom the
subject of the stables, in fact all subjects, vanished into air. Among the
broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles
being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look
squarely at every one, and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn't guess what
Daisy and Tom were thinking, but I doubt if even Miss Baker, who seemed to
have mastered a certain hardy scepticism, was able utterly to put this fifth
guest's shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the
situation might have seemed intriguing--my own instinct was to telephone
immediately for the police. The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned
again. Tom and Miss Baker, with several feet of twilight between them,
strolled back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible
body, while, trying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf, I
followed Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front.
In its deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee. Daisy took
her face in her hands as if feeling its lovely shape, and her eyes moved
gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent emotions possessed
her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about her
little girl. "We don't know each other very well, Nick," she said suddenly.
"Even if we are cousins. You didn't come to my wedding." "I wasn't back from
the war." "That's true." She hesitated. "Well, I've had a very bad time,
Nick, and I'm pretty cynical about everything." Evidently she had reason to
be. I waited but she didn't say any more, and after a moment I returned
rather feebly to the subject of her daughter. "I suppose she talks,
and--eats, and everything." "Oh, yes." She looked at me absently. "Listen,
Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to
hear?" "Very much." "It'll show you how I've gotten to feel about--things.
Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up
out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse
right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I
turned my head away and wept. 'all right,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a girl.
And I hope she'll be a fool--that's the best thing a girl can be in this
world, a beautiful little fool." "You see I think everything's terrible
anyhow," she went on in a convinced way. "Everybody thinks so--the most
advanced people. And I KNOW. I've been everywhere and seen everything and
done everything." Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like
Tom's, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. "Sophisticated--God, I'm
sophisticated!" The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my
attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It
made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to
exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment
she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face, as if she had
asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which
she and Tom belonged. Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light. Tom and
Miss Baker sat at either end of the long couch and she read aloud to him
from the SATURDAY EVENING POST.--the words, murmurous and uninflected,
running together in a soothing tune. The lamp-light, bright on his boots and
dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as she
turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms. When we came in
she held us silent for a moment with a lifted hand. "To be continued," she
said, tossing the magazine on the table, "in our very next issue." Her body
asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she stood up. "Ten
o'clock," she remarked, apparently finding the time on the ceiling. "Time
for this good girl to go to bed." "Jordan's going to play in the tournament
to-morrow," explained Daisy, "over at Westchester." "Oh--you're Jordan
BAKER." I knew now why her face was familiar--its pleasing contemptuous
expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of the
sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard some
story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had
forgotten long ago. "Good night," she said softly. "Wake me at eight, won't
you." "If you'll get up." "I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon."
"Of course you will," confirmed Daisy. "In fact I think I'll arrange a
marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I'll sort of--oh--fling you together.
You know--lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea
in a boat, and all that sort of thing----" "Good night," called Miss Baker
from the stairs. "I haven't heard a word." "She's a nice girl," said Tom
after a moment. "They oughtn't to let her run around the country this way."
"Who oughtn't to?" inquired Daisy coldly. "Her family." "Her family is one
aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Nick's going to look after her,
aren't you, Nick? She's going to spend lots of week-ends out here this
summer. I think the home influence will be very good for her." Daisy and Tom
looked at each other for a moment in silence. "Is she from New York?" I
asked quickly. "From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together
there. Our beautiful white----" "Did you give Nick a little heart to heart
talk on the veranda?" demanded Tom suddenly. "Did I?" She looked at me. "I
can't seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race. Yes,
I'm sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and first thing you know----"
"Don't believe everything you hear, Nick," he advised me. I said lightly
that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes later I got up to go
home. They came to the door with me and stood side by side in a cheerful
square of light. As I started my motor Daisy peremptorily called: "Wait!" "I
forgot to ask you something, and it's important. We heard you were engaged
to a girl out West." "That's right," corroborated Tom kindly. "We heard that
you were engaged." "It's libel. I'm too poor." "But we heard it," insisted
Daisy, surprising me by opening up again in a flower-like way. "We heard it
from three people, so it must be true." Of course I knew what they were
referring to, but I wasn't even vaguely engaged. The fact that gossip had
published the banns was one of the reasons I had come East. You can't stop
going with an old friend on account of rumors, and on the other hand I had
no intention of being rumored into marriage. Their interest rather touched
me and made them less remotely rich--nevertheless, I was confused and a
little disgusted as I drove away. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy
to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms--but apparently there were
no such intentions in her head. As for Tom, the fact that he "had some woman
in New York." was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by
a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his
sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart. Already it
was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where
new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at
West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned
grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright
night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the
full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a
moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and turning my head to watch it, I
saw that I was not alone--fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the
shadow of my neighbor's mansion and was standing with his hands in his
pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely
movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that
it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our
local heavens. I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at
dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn't call to him, for
he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone--he stretched
out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from
him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced
seaward--and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and
far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more
for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.
Chapter 2 About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road
hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as
to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of
ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills
and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and
rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly
and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray
cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes
to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and
stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from
your sight. But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift
endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J.
Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic--their
irises are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a
pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose.
Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice
in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness,
or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many
paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and, when
the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains
can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a
halt there of at least a minute, and it was because of this that I first met
Tom Buchanan's mistress. The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever
he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in
popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about,
chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her, I had no
desire to meet her--but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train
one afternoon, and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet
and, taking hold of my elbow, literally forced me from the car. "We're
getting off," he insisted. "I want you to meet my girl." I think he'd tanked
up a good deal at luncheon, and his determination to have my company
bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday
afternoon I had nothing better to do. I followed him over a low whitewashed
railroad fence, and we walked back a hundred yards along the road under
Doctor Eckleburg's persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small
block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of
compact Main Street ministering to it, and contiguous to absolutely nothing.
One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an
all-night restaurant, approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a
garage--Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars bought and sold.--and I followed Tom
inside. The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the
dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred
to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind, and that sumptuous and
romantic apartments were concealed overhead, when the proprietor himself
appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He
was a blond, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a
damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes. "Hello, Wilson, old
man," said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. "How's business?" "I
can't complain," answered Wilson unconvincingly. "When are you going to sell
me that car?" "Next week; I've got my man working on it now." "Works pretty
slow, don't he?" "No, he doesn't," said Tom coldly. "And if you feel that
way about it, maybe I'd better sell it somewhere else after all." "I don't
mean that," explained Wilson quickly. "I just meant----" His voice faded off
and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage. Then I heard footsteps on a
stairs, and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light
from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but
she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above
a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of
beauty, but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if
the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and,
walking through her husband as if he were a ghost, shook hands with Tom,
looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips, and without turning
around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: "Get some chairs, why
don't you, so somebody can sit down." "Oh, sure," agreed Wilson hurriedly,
and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement
color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale
hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity--except his wife, who moved
close to Tom. "I want to see you," said Tom intently. "Get on the next
train." "All right." "I'll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level."
She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two
chairs from his office door. We waited for her down the road and out of
sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a gray, scrawny
Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row along the railroad track.
"Terrible place, isn't it," said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor
Eckleburg. "Awful." "It does her good to get away." "Doesn't her husband
object?" "Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so
dumb he doesn't know he's alive." So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up
together to New York--or not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly
in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East
Eggers who might be on the train. She had changed her dress to a brown
figured muslin, which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom
helped her to the platform in New York. At the news-stand she bought a copy
of TOWN TATTLE. and a moving-picture magazine, and in the station drug-store
some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Up-stairs, in the solemn
echoing drive she let four taxicabs drive away before she selected a new
one, lavender-colored with gray upholstery, and in this we slid out from the
mass of the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she turned
sharply from the window and, leaning forward, tapped on the front glass. "I
want to get one of those dogs," she said earnestly. "I want to get one for
the apartment. They're nice to have--a dog." We backed up to a gray old man
who bore an absurd resemblance to John D. Rockefeller. In a basket swung
from his neck cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an indeterminate breed.
"What kind are they?" asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly, as he came to the
taxi-window. "All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?" "I'd like to get one
of those police dogs; I don't suppose you got that kind?" The man peered
doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling,
by the back of the neck. "That's no police dog," said Tom. "No, it's not
exactly a polICE dog," said the man with disappointment in his voice. "It's
more of an Airedale." He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back.
"Look at that coat. Some coat. That's a dog that'll never bother you with
catching cold." "I think it's cute," said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. "How
much is it?" "That dog?" He looked at it admiringly. "That dog will cost you
ten dollars." The Airedale--undoubtedly there was an Airedale concerned in
it somewhere, though its feet were startlingly white--changed hands and
settled down into Mrs. Wilson's lap, where she fondled the weather-proof
coat with rapture. "Is it a boy or a girl?" she asked delicately. "That dog?
That dog's a boy." "It's a bitch," said Tom decisively. "Here's your money.
Go and buy ten more dogs with it." We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm
and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn't
have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner.
"Hold on," I said, "I have to leave you here." "No, you don't," interposed
Tom quickly. "Myrtle'll be hurt if you don't come up to the apartment. Won't
you, Myrtle?" "Come on," she urged. "I'll telephone my sister Catherine.
She's said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know." "Well, I'd
like to, but----" We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the
West Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white
cake of apartment-houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the
neighborhood, Mrs. Wilson gathered up her dog and her other purchases, and
went haughtily in. "I'm going to have the McKees come up," she announced as
we rose in the elevator. "And, of course, I got to call up my sister, too."
The apartment was on the top floor--a small living-room, a small
dining-room, a small bedroom, and a bath. The living-room was crowded to the
doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it, so that
to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in
the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph,
apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance,
however, the hen resolved itself into a bonnet, and the countenance of a
stout old lady beamed down into the room. Several old copies of TOWN TATTLE.
lay on the table together with a copy of SIMON CALLED PETER, and some of the
small scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with
the dog. A reluctant elevator-boy went for a box full of straw and some
milk, to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large, hard
dog-biscuits--one of which decomposed apathetically in the saucer of milk
all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked
bureau door. I have been drunk just twice in my life, and the second time
was that afternoon; so everything that happened has a dim, hazy cast over
it, although until after eight o'clock the apartment was full of cheerful
sun. Sitting on Tom's lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the
telephone; then there were no cigarettes, and I went out to buy some at the
drugstore on the corner. When I came back they had disappeared, so I sat
down discreetly in the living-room and read a chapter of SIMON CALLED
PETER.--either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things,
because it didn't make any sense to me. Just as Tom and Myrtle (after the
first drink Mrs. Wilson and I called each other by our first names)
reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment-door. The sister,
Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty, with a solid, sticky
bob of red hair, and a complexion powdered milky white. Her eye-brows had
been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle, but the efforts
of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to
her face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as
innumerable pottery bracelets jingled up and down upon her arms. She came in
with such a proprietary haste, and looked around so possessively at the
furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she
laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud, and told me she lived with