# The Great Gatsby (B1 edition)

*F. Scott Fitzgerald*

## I

When I was younger and more easily hurt, my father gave me some advice. I have been thinking about it ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

He didn’t say any more. But in our family we have always understood each other well without many words. So I knew that he meant a lot more than that. Because of this, I usually try not to judge people. This habit has opened up many strange characters to me. It has also made me the victim of quite a few terrible bores. People with unusual minds are quick to notice this quality in a normal person, and they hold on to him. So in college I was unfairly called a politician, because wild, unknown men told me their secret troubles. Most of the time I did not ask for these secrets. Often I saw clearly that a private confession was coming. Then I pretended to sleep, or I pretended to be busy, or I made unfriendly jokes. The private confessions of young men are usually copied from other people. And they usually hide important things. Not judging people is a matter of endless hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget one thing. My father said it like a snob, and I repeat it like a snob. People are not all born with the same sense of basic decency.

After boasting like this about my tolerance, I must admit that it has a limit. People’s behaviour may be built on hard rock or on wet marshes. But after a certain point I don’t care what it is built on. When I came back from the East last autumn, I wanted the world to be in uniform. I wanted it to stand at a kind of moral attention forever. I wanted no more wild trips with special looks into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was free from my reaction. Gatsby represented everything that I truly hate. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something wonderful about him. He was very sensitive to the promises of life. It was as if he were related to one of those complicated machines that record earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This had nothing to do with the weak, easily moved feeling that people proudly call the “creative temperament.” It was an extraordinary gift for hope. It was a romantic readiness that I have never found in any other person. And I will probably never find it again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end. The problem was the things that fed on Gatsby, the foul dust that floated behind his dreams. Because of them, I lost interest for a while in men’s useless sorrows and short-lived joys.

My family have been important, well-off people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan. We have a family tradition that we come from the Dukes of Buccleuch. But the real founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother. He came here in fifty-one and sent a substitute to fight for him in the Civil War. Then he started the wholesale hardware business that my father runs today.

I never saw this great-uncle, but people say I look like him. They say this especially about the rather tough-looking painting of him that hangs in father’s office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, exactly a quarter of a century after my father. A little later I took part in that late Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so much that I came back restless. Before, the Middle West had seemed like the warm centre of the world. Now it 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 thought 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. Finally they said, “Why—ye-es,” with very serious, unsure faces. Father agreed to pay for me for a year. After various delays I came East in the spring of twenty-two. I thought I was coming for good.

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, an old, weather-damaged little bungalow as thin as cardboard, 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. I also had an old Dodge and a Finnish woman. She made my bed and cooked breakfast, and she muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so. Then one morning a man stopped me on the road. He had arrived even more recently than I had.

“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, one of the first settlers. Without thinking about it, he had given me the freedom of the neighbourhood.

And so came the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves on the trees. They grew as fast as things grow in fast movies. I had that familiar feeling that life was beginning again with the summer.

There was so much to read, for one thing. And there was so much good health to breathe in from the young, fresh air. I bought a dozen books on banking and credit and investment securities. They stood on my shelf in red and gold, like new money from the mint. They promised to show me the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. I also had the high intention of reading many other books. I was rather literary in college. One year I wrote a series of very serious and obvious editorials for the *Yale News*. Now I was going to bring all these things back into my life. I would become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just a clever saying. Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

It was pure chance that I rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that long, thin, lively island that stretches east of New York. There, among other natural curiosities, are two unusual shapes of land. Twenty miles from the city there are two enormous eggs. They have the same outline and are separated only by a courtesy bay. They stick out into the tamest 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 pressed flat at the end where they touch. But they look so alike that they must be a constant wonder to the gulls that fly overhead. To people without wings, something else is more interesting. The two eggs are different in every way except shape and size.

I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two. But this is a very shallow label for the strange and rather sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound. It was squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was enormous by any standard. It was an exact copy of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy. It had a tower on one side, shining new under a thin beard of young ivy. It had a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby’s mansion. Or rather, since I didn’t know Mr. Gatsby, it was a mansion where a gentleman of that name lived. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and nobody had noticed it. So I had a view of the water and a partial view of my neighbour’s lawn. I also had the comforting nearness of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.

Across the courtesy bay, the white palaces of fashionable East Egg shone along the water. 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 had known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.

Her husband was good at many sports. Among other things, he had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven. He was a national figure in a way. He was one of those men who reach a sharp, limited excellence at twenty-one. After that, everything feels like an anticlimax. His family were enormously wealthy. Even in college people criticized how freely he spent money. But now he had left Chicago and come East in a way that rather took your breath away. For example, he had brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to believe that a man of 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 special reason. Then they drifted restlessly here and there, wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, Daisy said on the telephone. But I didn’t believe it. I could not see into Daisy’s heart. But I felt that Tom would drift on forever. He would always be searching, a little sadly, for the dramatic excitement of some football game that could never come back.

And so, on a warm, windy evening, I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I hardly knew at all. Their house was even grander than I expected. It was a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, looking over the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran towards the front door for a quarter of a mile. It jumped over sundials and brick paths and burning-bright gardens. Finally, when it reached the house, it climbed up the side in bright vines, as if it could not stop running. The front of the house had a line of French windows. They were glowing now with reflected gold and were wide open to the warm, windy afternoon. 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 strong, straw-haired man of thirty, with a rather hard mouth and a proud, superior manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes ruled his face. They made him look as if he was always leaning forward aggressively. Even his elegant, almost feminine riding clothes could not hide the enormous power of that body. He seemed to fill those shining boots until the top laces were tight. You could see a great pack of muscle move when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body that could push and lift with enormous force—a cruel body.

His speaking voice was a rough, husky tenor, and it made him seem even more quarrelsome. There was a touch of fatherly contempt in it, even towards people he liked. And there were men at New Haven who had really hated him.

“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. We were never close friends. But I always had the feeling that he approved of me. He wanted me to like him, with a hard, defiant kind of longing 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.

He turned me around by one arm. He moved a broad, flat hand along the view in front of us. It included a sunken Italian garden, half an acre of deep, strong-smelling roses, and a snub-nosed motorboat. The boat was bumping on the tide near the shore.

“It belonged to Demaine, the oil man.” He turned me around again, politely and suddenly. “We’ll go inside.”

We walked through a high hallway into a bright, rosy-coloured room. It seemed only lightly joined to the house by French windows at both ends. The windows were partly open and shone white against the fresh grass outside. The grass seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room. It blew the curtains in at one end and out at the other, like pale flags. It twisted them up toward the ceiling, which looked like the white icing on a wedding cake. Then it rippled over the wine-coloured rug and made a shadow on it, as wind does on the sea.

The only object in the room that was completely still was an enormous couch. Two young women were floating on it, as if on a balloon tied to the ground. They were both in white. 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 back windows. The trapped wind died away in the room. And the curtains and the rugs and the two young women slowly floated back down to the floor.

The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was lying at full length at her end of the couch, completely still. Her chin was raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it that might easily fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes, she didn’t show it. In fact, I almost said I was sorry for disturbing her by coming in.

The other girl, Daisy, tried to get up. She leaned forward a little with a serious, careful expression. Then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh. I laughed too and came forward into the room.

“I’m p-paralysed with happiness.”

She laughed again, as if she had said something very witty. She held my hand for a moment and looked up into my face. Her look promised that there was no one in the world she wanted to see so much. That was a way she had. In a low murmur she told me that the balancing girl’s surname was Baker. (I have heard people say that Daisy murmured only to make people lean toward her. It was an unimportant criticism, and it did not make her murmur any less charming.)

At any rate, Miss Baker’s lips moved a little. She nodded at me so slightly that I could hardly see it. Then she quickly tipped her head back again. The object she was balancing had clearly moved a little and frightened her. Again I almost said sorry. Almost any show of complete self-sufficiency fills me with amazed respect.

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. Each sentence was like 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 hard to forget. It was a singing pull, a whispered “Listen.” It was a promise that she had just done gay, exciting things. And it promised that more gay, exciting things were waiting in the next hour.

I told her that I had stopped in Chicago for a day on my way East. A dozen people had sent their love through me.

“Do they miss me?” she cried happily.

“The whole town is heartbroken. All the cars have the left back wheel painted black, like a mourning wreath. And you can hear people crying all night along the north shore.”

“How gorgeous! Let’s go back, Tom. Tomorrow!” Then she added, without any connection: “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 had been moving restlessly about the room. Now he 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 said firmly.

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. He glanced at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were waiting for something more. “I’d be a God damned fool to live anywhere else.”

At this point Miss Baker said, “Absolutely!” so suddenly that I jumped. It was the first word she had said since I came into the room. Clearly it surprised her as much as it surprised me. She yawned, and with a series of quick, skilful movements she stood up.

“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 answered. “I’ve been trying to get you to New York all afternoon.”

“No, thanks,” said Miss Baker to the four cocktails that had just come in from the pantry. “I’m absolutely in training.”

Her host looked at her as if he could not believe it.

“You are!” He drank his cocktail as if it were only a drop at the bottom of a glass. “How you ever get anything done is beyond me.”

I looked at Miss Baker and wondered what it was that she “got done.” I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, and she held herself very straight. She made this even stronger by pulling her shoulders back, like a young cadet. Her grey eyes, tired from the sun, looked back at me with polite curiosity. Her face was pale, charming and discontented. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before.

“You live in West Egg,” she said with contempt. “I know somebody there.”

“I don’t know a single—”

“You must know Gatsby.”

“Gatsby?” asked Daisy sharply. “What Gatsby?”

Before I could answer that he was my neighbour, dinner was announced. Tom Buchanan pushed his tense arm firmly under mine. He moved me out of the room as if he were moving a checker to another square.

Slowly and lazily, with their hands resting lightly on their hips, the two young women walked ahead of us. They went out onto a rosy-coloured porch that was open toward the sunset. Four candles flickered on the table in the weaker wind.

“Why *candles*?” objected Daisy, frowning. She put them out with her fingers. “In two weeks it’ll be the longest day in the year.” She looked at us all with a radiant face. “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. She sat 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 fixed on her little finger with a shocked expression.

“Look!” she complained. “I hurt it.”

We all looked. The knuckle was black and blue.

“You did it, Tom,” she said, accusing him. “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 the same time. They did it quietly, with a teasing lightness that was never quite empty chatter. It was as cool as their white dresses and their calm eyes, which showed no desire at all. They were here, and they accepted Tom and me. They made only a polite, pleasant effort to entertain us or to be entertained. They knew that soon dinner would be over. A little later the evening would be over too, and it would be casually put away. It was very different from the West. There, an evening was hurried from one stage to the next toward its end. People kept hoping for something and kept being disappointed. Or they simply felt nervous fear of the moment itself.

“You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy,” I confessed. I was on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. “Can’t you talk about crops or something?”

I meant nothing special by this remark, but it was taken up in an unexpected way.

“Civilization’s going to pieces,” Tom burst out violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read *The Rise of the Coloured Empires* by this man Goddard?”

“Why, no,” I answered. I was 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 a look of thoughtless 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. She winked fiercely toward the burning sun.

“You ought to live in California—” began Miss Baker. But Tom interrupted her by moving heavily in his chair.

“This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and—” He hesitated for a tiny moment. Then 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. It was as if his self-satisfaction, stronger than before, was no longer enough for him. Almost immediately the telephone rang inside, and the butler left the porch. Daisy used this short interruption and leaned towards me.

“I’ll tell you a family secret,” she whispered eagerly. “It’s about the butler’s nose. Do you want to hear about the butler’s nose?”

“That’s why I came over tonight.”

“Well, he wasn’t always a butler. He used to be the silver polisher for some people in New York. They 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 on her glowing face. Her voice pulled me forward, and I listened breathlessly. Then the glow faded. Each light left her slowly and with regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.

The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom’s ear. Tom frowned, pushed back his chair and went inside without a word. His absence seemed to wake something inside Daisy. She leaned forward again, and her voice was 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 agreement: “An absolute rose?”

This was untrue. I am not even a little like a rose. She was only making it up as she went along. But a warm, stirring feeling flowed from her. It was as if her heart was trying to come out to you, hidden in one of those breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table, excused herself and went into the house.

Miss Baker and I exchanged a short look. We made sure it had no meaning at all. I was about to speak when she sat up quickly and said “*Sh!*” in a warning voice. A low, passionate murmur could be heard in the room beyond. Miss Baker leaned forward without any shame, trying to hear. The murmur almost became clear words. Then it sank down, rose excitedly, and stopped completely.

“This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbour—” I began.

“Don’t talk. I want to hear what happens.”

“Is something happening?” I asked innocently.

“You mean to say you don’t know?” said Miss Baker, honestly surprised. “I thought everybody knew.”

“I don’t.”

“Why—” she said, hesitating. “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?”

I had hardly understood her meaning when I heard the flutter of a dress and the crunch of leather boots. Tom and Daisy were back at the table.

“It couldn’t be helped!” cried Daisy with tense cheerfulness.

She sat down and looked searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me. Then she continued: “I looked outdoors for a minute, and it’s very romantic outdoors. There’s a bird on the lawn. I think it must be a nightingale that came 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. Then he said miserably to me: “If it’s light enough after dinner, I want to take you down to the stables.”

The telephone rang inside, suddenly and loudly. Daisy shook her head firmly at Tom, and the subject of the stables disappeared. In fact, all subjects disappeared into the air. I remember only broken pieces of the last five minutes at the table. The candles were lit again, for no reason. I wanted to look straight at everyone, and yet I wanted to avoid all eyes. I couldn’t guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking. Miss Baker seemed to have a strong, hard scepticism. But I doubt that even she could forget the shrill, metallic urgency of this fifth guest. To some people the situation might have seemed interesting. My own instinct was to telephone the police at once.

The horses, of course, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss Baker walked slowly back into the library, with several feet of twilight between them. It was as if they were going to keep watch beside a real dead body. I tried to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf. I followed Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the front porch. In its deep darkness we sat down side by side on a wicker settee.

Daisy held her face in her hands, as if she was feeling its lovely shape. Her eyes moved slowly out into the soft, velvet dusk. I saw that strong, wild emotions had hold of her. So I asked her some questions about her little girl, which I hoped would calm her.

“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.”

Clearly she had a reason to be. I waited, but she didn’t say any more. After a moment I went back, rather weakly, 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. I 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, as if she was sure of it. “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. She laughed with thrilling scorn. “Sophisticated—God, I’m sophisticated!”

As soon as her voice stopped, it no longer held my attention and my belief. Then I felt that what she had said was basically insincere. It made me uneasy. It was as if the whole evening had been some kind of trick to get an emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, a moment later she looked at me with a real smirk on her lovely face. It was as if she had shown that she belonged to a rather special secret society. She and Tom were both members of it.

Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light. Tom and Miss Baker sat at the two ends of the long couch. She was reading aloud to him from the *Saturday Evening Post*. The words were soft and flat, and they ran together in a soothing tune. The lamplight was bright on his boots and dull on her hair, which was the yellow of an autumn leaf. It shone along the paper as she turned a page, and the slender muscles in her arms moved a little.

When we came in, she lifted a hand and kept us silent for a moment.

“To be continued,” she said, throwing the magazine on the table, “in our very next issue.”

Her body moved restlessly, with a movement of her knee, and she stood up.

“Ten o’clock,” she said. She seemed to find the time on the ceiling. “Time for this good girl to go to bed.”

“Jordan’s going to play in the tournament tomorrow,” explained Daisy, “over at Westchester.”

“Oh—you’re *Jor*dan Baker.”

Now I knew why her face was familiar. Its pleasant, scornful expression had looked out at me from many photographs in the Sunday picture pages. They were pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard some story about her too, a critical, unpleasant story. But I had forgotten what it was 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,” Daisy agreed. “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. 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?” asked Daisy coldly.

“Her family.”

“Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Nick’s going to look after her, aren’t you, Nick? She’s going to spend lots of weekends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be very good for her.”

Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment in silence.

“Is she from New York?” I asked quickly.

“From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our beautiful white—”

“Did you give Nick a little heart to heart talk on the veranda?” Tom asked 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. 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 called in a commanding voice: “Wait!

“I forgot to ask you something, and it’s important. We heard you were engaged to a girl out West.”

“That’s right,” Tom agreed kindly. “We heard that you were engaged.”

“It’s a libel. I’m too poor.”

“But we heard it,” insisted Daisy. She surprised me by opening up again, like a flower. “We heard it from three people, so it must be true.”

Of course I knew what they meant, but I wasn’t even nearly engaged. The gossip had almost announced the wedding, and this was one of the reasons I had come East. You can’t stop seeing an old friend because of rumours. But on the other hand I had no intention of being rumoured into marriage.

Their interest rather touched me. It made them seem less distantly rich. But still, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away. I thought that Daisy ought to rush out of the house with her child in her arms. But clearly she had no such plans in her head. As for Tom, the fact that he “had some woman in New York” was not really very surprising. It was more surprising that a book had depressed him. Something was making him nibble at the edges of stale old ideas. It was as if his strong physical selfishness no longer fed his demanding heart.

It was already deep summer on the roofs of roadhouses and in front of garages along the road. There, new red petrol-pumps sat out in pools of light. When I reached my estate at West Egg, I drove the car into its shed. Then I sat for a while on an old, unused grass roller in the yard. The wind had dropped. It left a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees. There was a constant organ sound, as if the full bellows of the earth were blowing the frogs full of life. The outline of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight. I turned my head to watch it, and I saw that I was not alone. Fifty feet away a figure had come out of the shadow of my neighbour’s mansion. He was standing with his hands in his pockets, looking at the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his relaxed movements and the sure way his feet stood on the lawn told me who it was. It was Mr. Gatsby himself. He had come out to decide what part of our local sky belonged to him.

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. He suddenly showed that he was happy to be alone. He stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way. I was far away from him, but I could have sworn he was trembling. Without thinking, I looked out to sea. I could see nothing except a single green light, very small and far away. It might have been the end of a dock. When I looked for Gatsby again, he had vanished. I was alone again in the restless darkness.

### Glossary

- **bond business**: the work of selling bonds, papers that people buy as an investment
- **commuting town**: a town where people live and travel to work in the city every day
- **courtesy bay**: a small bay of water; Nick jokes that it is only "polite" to call it a bay
- **Hôtel de Ville**: the French name for a town hall, a large and grand public building
- **ends**: players in American football who play at the two sides of the line
- **senior society**: a private club for students in their last year at Yale
- **Nordics**: Tom's name for white people from northern Europe; his ideas about race are false and foolish
- **ether**: a drug that doctors used to make people sleep during an operation or a birth
- **anon**: an old word meaning "soon"
- **libel**: a false statement that hurts someone's good name

## II

About halfway between West Egg and New York, the motor road suddenly joins the railroad. It runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, as if it wants to keep away from a certain empty, sad area of land. This is a valley of ashes. It is a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens. Here ashes take the shapes of houses and chimneys and rising smoke. Finally, with a great effort, they even take the shape of ash-grey men. These men move dimly through the powdery air, and they are already crumbling. Now and then a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track. It gives a terrible creak and stops. At once the ash-grey men swarm up with heavy spades. They stir up a thick cloud, and you cannot see their secret work.

But above the grey land and the bursts of cold dust that drift endlessly over it, you notice something after a moment. You see the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic. Their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face. Instead, they look out from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles, which sit over a nose that isn’t there. Clearly some wild joker of an oculist put them there to get more customers in the borough of Queens. Then he himself went blind forever, or he forgot them and moved away. But his eyes are still there. They are a little faded after many days without new paint, under sun and rain. And they keep watching darkly over the solemn dumping ground.

On one side of the valley of ashes there is a small, dirty river. When the drawbridge is up to let barges through, passengers on the waiting trains can stare at the sad scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a stop there of at least a minute. Because of this stop, I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress.

Everybody who knew him talked about the fact that he had one. The people he knew didn’t like it that he appeared in popular cafés with her. He would leave her at a table and walk around, chatting with anyone he knew. I was curious to see her, but I had no desire to meet her. But I did meet her. One afternoon I went up to New York with Tom on the train. When we stopped by the ash-heaps, he jumped to his feet. He took hold of my elbow and really forced me out of the car.

“We’re getting off,” he insisted. “I want you to meet my girl.”

I think he had drunk a lot at lunch. He was so determined to have me with him that it was almost violent. In his proud way, he assumed that on a Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do.

I followed him over a low whitewashed railroad fence. We walked back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg’s steady stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick at the edge of the waste land. It was a sort of tiny Main Street that served the waste land, and there was absolutely nothing next to it. It had three shops. One was for rent. Another was an all-night restaurant, which you reached by a path of ashes. The third was a garage—*Repairs.* **George B. Wilson.** *Cars bought and sold.*—and I followed Tom inside.

Inside, it was bare and poor. The only car I could see was the dusty wreck of a Ford, which crouched in a dark corner. I had started to think that this shadow of a garage must be a disguise. Perhaps rich and romantic apartments were hidden upstairs. Just then the owner himself appeared in the door of an office. He was wiping his hands on a piece of old cloth. He was a blond man with no energy. He was pale and weak-looking, and a little handsome. When he saw us, a damp gleam of hope appeared in his light blue eyes.

“Hello, Wilson, old man,” said Tom, slapping him cheerfully on the shoulder. “How’s business?”

“I can’t complain,” answered Wilson, but he did not sound sure. “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,” Wilson explained quickly. “I just meant—”

His voice faded away, and Tom looked impatiently around the garage. Then I heard footsteps on some stairs. A moment later the thickish figure of a woman blocked the light from the office door. She was in her middle thirties and a little stout. But she carried her body in a sensual way, as some women can. She wore a spotted dress of dark blue crêpe-de-chine. Her face had no beauty in it at all. But you could see at once that she was full of life. It was as if the nerves of her body were always slowly burning. She smiled slowly. She walked past her husband as if he were a ghost, and shook hands with Tom. She looked him straight in the eye. Then she wet her lips. Without turning around, she spoke to her husband in a soft, rough voice:

“Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.”

“Oh, sure,” Wilson agreed hurriedly. He went toward the little office, and at once his colour mixed with the cement colour of the walls. A white dust of ash covered his dark suit and his pale hair. It covered everything nearby—except his wife, who moved close to Tom.

“I want to see you,” said Tom intently. “Get on the next train.”

“All right.”

“I’ll meet you by the newsstand on the lower level.”

She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson came out of his office door with two chairs.

We waited for her down the road, where nobody could see us. It was a few days before the Fourth of July. A grey, thin Italian child was putting torpedoes in a row along the railroad track.

“Terrible place, isn’t it,” said Tom. He frowned at Doctor Eckleburg, and Doctor Eckleburg seemed to frown back.

“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 to New York together. Or not quite together, because Mrs. Wilson sat carefully in another car of the train. Tom did that much to respect the feelings of any East Eggers who might be on the train.

She had changed into a brown muslin dress with a pattern on it. It stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her down to the platform in New York. At the newsstand she bought a copy of *Town Tattle* and a moving-picture magazine. In the station drugstore she bought some cold cream and a small bottle of perfume. Upstairs, in the serious, echoing drive, she let four taxis go away. Then she chose a new one, lavender-coloured with grey seats. In this taxi we slid out of the great station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window, leaned forward and tapped on the front glass.

“I want to get one of those dogs,” she said seriously. “I want to get one for the apartment. They’re nice to have—a dog.”

We backed up to a grey old man who looked absurdly like John D. Rockefeller. A basket hung from his neck. In it a dozen very young puppies of no clear breed were hiding in fear.

“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 looked doubtfully into the basket. He pushed his hand in and pulled one up by the back of the neck. It was wriggling.

“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 its brown back, which looked like an old washcloth. “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 happily. “How much is it?”

“That dog?” He looked at it with admiration. “That dog will cost you ten dollars.”

The Airedale changed hands. There was surely an Airedale in its family somewhere, though its feet were surprisingly white. It settled down in Mrs. Wilson’s lap. She stroked its weatherproof coat with delight.

“Is it a boy or a girl?” she asked delicately.

“That dog? That dog’s a boy.”

“It’s a bitch,” said Tom firmly. “Here’s your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it.”

We drove over to Fifth Avenue. On that summer Sunday afternoon it was warm and soft, almost like the countryside. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep come round the corner.

“Hold on,” I said, “I have to leave you here.”

“No you don’t,” Tom said 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 taxi stopped at one slice of a long white cake of apartment-houses. Mrs. Wilson threw a royal look around the neighbourhood, as if she were coming home. Then she gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went in proudly.

“I’m going to have the McKees come up,” she announced as we went up in the elevator. “And, of course, I got to call up my sister, too.”

The apartment was on the top floor. It had a small living-room, a small dining-room, a small bedroom, and a bath. The living-room was crowded right up to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture. It was much too large for the room. When you moved about, you kept stumbling over pictures of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture on the wall was a photograph that had been made far too big. It seemed to show a hen sitting on a blurred rock. But when you looked at it from a distance, the hen became a bonnet. Then the face of a stout old lady smiled down into the room. Several old copies of *Town Tattle* lay on the table. There was also a copy of *Simon Called Peter* and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson first took care of the dog. An unwilling elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk. On his own idea, he also brought a tin of large, hard dog biscuits. One of them slowly fell apart in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom took a bottle of whisky from behind the locked door of a cupboard.

I have been drunk only twice in my life, and the second time was that afternoon. So everything that happened has a dim, hazy look to me. But until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Mrs. Wilson sat on Tom’s lap and called up several people on the telephone. Then there were no cigarettes, and I went out to buy some at the drugstore on the corner. When I came back, they had both disappeared. So I sat down quietly in the living-room and read a chapter of *Simon Called Peter*. Either it was terrible stuff or the whisky changed things, because it didn’t make any sense to me.

Tom and Myrtle came back. (After the first drink, Mrs. Wilson and I called each other by our first names.) Just then, guests began to arrive at the apartment door.

The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty. She had a solid, sticky bob of red hair, and her skin was powdered milky white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more daring angle. But nature was trying to bring back the old line, and this made her face look blurred. When she moved, there was a constant clicking. Countless pottery bracelets jingled up and down her arms. She came in so quickly and looked around at the furniture so possessively that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her, she laughed much too loudly. She repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel.

Mr. McKee was a pale, feminine man from the flat below. He had just shaved, because there was a white spot of shaving lather on his cheekbone. He greeted everyone in the room very respectfully. He told me that he was in the “artistic game.” Later I understood that he was a photographer. He had made the dim enlargement of Mrs. Wilson’s mother that floated like a ghost on the wall. His wife was shrill, lazy, handsome, and horrible. She told me proudly that her husband had photographed her a hundred and twenty-seven times since they had been married.

Mrs. Wilson had changed her clothes some time before. Now she was wearing a fancy afternoon dress of cream-coloured chiffon. It rustled all the time as she swept about the room. With the dress, her personality had changed too. The strong vitality that had been so striking in the garage had turned into an impressive pride. Her laughter, her gestures and her statements became more and more false every moment. As she grew bigger, the room grew smaller around her. In the end she seemed to be turning on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.

“My dear,” she told her sister in a high, affected shout, “most of these fellas will cheat you every time. All they think of is money. I had a woman up here last week to look at my feet. When she gave me the bill, you’d of thought she had my appendicitis out.”

“What was the name of the woman?” asked Mrs. McKee.

“Mrs. Eberhardt. She goes around looking at people’s feet in their own homes.”

“I like your dress,” said Mrs. McKee. “I think it’s adorable.”

Mrs. Wilson refused the compliment. She raised her eyebrow scornfully.

“It’s just a crazy old thing,” she said. “I just slip it on sometimes when I don’t care what I look like.”

“But it looks wonderful on you, if you know what I mean,” Mrs. McKee went on. “If Chester could only get you in that pose I think he could make something of it.”

We all looked silently at Mrs. Wilson. She moved a piece of hair away from her eyes and looked back at us with a brilliant smile. Mr. McKee looked at her closely with his head on one side. Then he moved his hand slowly back and forth in front of his face.

“I should change the light,” he said after a moment. “I’d like to bring out the modelling of the features. And I’d try to get hold of all the back hair.”

“I wouldn’t think of changing the light,” cried Mrs. McKee. “I think it’s—”

Her husband said “*Sh!*” and we all looked at the subject again. Then Tom Buchanan yawned loudly and got to his feet.

“You McKees have something to drink,” he said. “Get some more ice and mineral water, Myrtle, before everybody goes to sleep.”

“I told that boy about the ice.” Myrtle raised her eyebrows in despair at how lazy the lower classes were. “These people! You have to keep after them all the time.”

She looked at me and laughed for no reason. Then she hurried over to the dog and kissed it with great joy. After that she swept into the kitchen, as if a dozen chefs were waiting there for her orders.

“I’ve done some nice things out on Long Island,” said Mr. McKee.

Tom looked at him blankly.

“Two of them we have framed downstairs.”

“Two what?” demanded Tom.

“Two studies. One of them I call *Montauk Point—The Gulls*, and the other I call *Montauk Point—The Sea*.”

The sister, Catherine, sat down beside me on the couch.

“Do you live down on Long Island, too?” she asked.

“I live at West Egg.”

“Really? I was down there at a party about a month ago. At a man named Gatsby’s. Do you know him?”

“I live next door to him.”

“Well, they say he’s a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm’s. That’s where all his money comes from.”

“Really?”

She nodded.

“I’m scared of him. I’d hate to have him get anything on me.”

This fascinating information about my neighbour was interrupted. Mrs. McKee suddenly pointed at Catherine.

“Chester, I think you could do something with *her*,” she burst out. But Mr. McKee only nodded in a bored way and turned to Tom.

“I’d like to do more work on Long Island, if I could get the entry. All I ask is that they should give me a start.”

“Ask Myrtle,” said Tom. He gave a short shout of laughter as Mrs. Wilson came in with a tray. “She’ll give you a letter of introduction, won’t you, Myrtle?”

“Do what?” she asked, surprised.

“You’ll give McKee a letter of introduction to your husband, so he can do some studies of him.” His lips moved silently for a moment as he invented something. “ ‘George B. Wilson at the Gasoline Pump,’ or something like that.”

Catherine leaned close to me and whispered in my ear:

“Neither of them can stand the person they’re married to.”

“Can’t they?”

“Can’t *stand* them.” She looked at Myrtle and then at Tom. “What I say is, why go on living with them if they can’t stand them? If I was them I’d get a divorce and get married to each other right away.”

“Doesn’t she like Wilson either?”

The answer to this was unexpected. It came from Myrtle, who had heard the question. It was violent and obscene.

“You see,” cried Catherine, as if she had won. She lowered her voice again. “It’s really his wife that’s keeping them apart. She’s a Catholic, and they don’t believe in divorce.”

Daisy was not a Catholic. I was a little shocked at how detailed the lie was.

“When they do get married,” Catherine went on, “they’re going West to live for a while until it blows over.”

“It’d be more discreet to go to Europe.”

“Oh, do you like Europe?” she cried, to my surprise. “I just got back from Monte Carlo.”

“Really.”

“Just last year. I went over there with another girl.”

“Stay long?”

“No, we just went to Monte Carlo and back. We went by way of Marseilles. We had over twelve hundred dollars when we started. But we got gyped out of it all in two days in the private rooms. We had an awful time getting back, I can tell you. God, how I hated that town!”

For a moment the late afternoon sky bloomed in the window like the blue honey of the Mediterranean. Then the shrill voice of Mrs. McKee called me back into the room.

“I almost made a mistake, too,” she said strongly. “I almost married a little kike who’d been after me for years. I knew he was below me. Everybody kept saying to me: ‘Lucille, that man’s way below you!’ But if I hadn’t met Chester, he’d of got me sure.”

“Yes, but listen,” said Myrtle Wilson, nodding her head up and down, “at least you didn’t marry him.”

“I know I didn’t.”

“Well, I married him,” said Myrtle, in a way that was not quite clear. “And that’s the difference between your case and mine.”

“Why did you, Myrtle?” demanded Catherine. “Nobody forced you to.”

Myrtle thought about it.

“I married him because I thought he was a gentleman,” she said finally. “I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn’t fit to lick my shoe.”

“You were crazy about him for a while,” said Catherine.

“Crazy about him!” cried Myrtle, as if she could not believe it. “Who said I was crazy about him? I never was any more crazy about him than I was about that man there.”

She suddenly pointed at me, and everyone looked at me as if I had done something wrong. I tried to show by my face that I expected no love from her.

“The only *crazy* I was was when I married him. I knew right away I made a mistake. He borrowed somebody’s best suit to get married in, and never even told me about it. And the man came after it one day when he was out. ‘Oh, is that your suit?’ I said. ‘This is the first I ever heard about it.’ But I gave it to him, and then I lay down and cried my eyes out all afternoon.”

“She really ought to get away from him,” Catherine said to me again. “They’ve been living over that garage for eleven years. And Tom’s the first sweetie she ever had.”

The bottle of whisky—a second one—was now in constant demand by everyone there except Catherine. She “felt just as good on nothing at all.” Tom rang for the janitor and sent him for some famous sandwiches, which were a complete supper in themselves. I wanted to get out and walk east toward the park through the soft twilight. But each time I tried to go, I got caught in some wild, loud argument. It pulled me back into my chair, as if with ropes. Yet high over the city, our line of yellow windows must have shown their share of human secrets to some casual watcher in the darkening streets. And I saw him too, looking up and wondering. I was inside and outside at the same time. I was both enchanted and disgusted by the endless variety of life.

Myrtle pulled her chair close to mine. Suddenly her warm breath poured over me as she told me the story of her first meeting with Tom.

“It was on the two little seats facing each other that are always the last ones left on the train. I was going up to New York to see my sister and spend the night. He had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off him. But every time he looked at me I had to pretend to be looking at the advertisement over his head. When we came into the station he was next to me, and his white shirtfront pressed against my arm. So I told him I’d have to call a policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so excited that when I got into a taxi with him, I didn’t hardly know I wasn’t getting into a subway train. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.’ ”

She turned to Mrs. McKee, and the room rang with her false laughter.

“My dear,” she cried, “I’m going to give you this dress as soon as I’m through with it. I’ve got to get another one tomorrow. I’m going to make a list of all the things I’ve got to get. A massage and a wave, and a collar for the dog, and one of those cute little ashtrays where you touch a spring. And a wreath with a black silk bow for mother’s grave that’ll last all summer. I got to write down a list so I won’t forget all the things I got to do.”

It was nine o’clock. Almost immediately afterwards I looked at my watch and found it was ten. Mr. McKee was asleep on a chair with his fists closed tight in his lap, like a photograph of a man of action. I took out my handkerchief. I wiped from his cheek the spot of dried lather that had worried me all afternoon.

The little dog was sitting on the table, looking with blind eyes through the smoke. From time to time it groaned softly. People disappeared and reappeared. They made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other. They searched for each other and found each other a few feet away. Some time toward midnight, Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood face to face. They were arguing in passionate voices about whether Mrs. Wilson had any right to say Daisy’s name.

“Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!” shouted Mrs. Wilson. “I’ll say it whenever I want to! Daisy! Dai—”

With a short, skilful movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand.

Then there were bloody towels on the bathroom floor, and women’s voices scolding. High over all the confusion there was a long, broken cry of pain. Mr. McKee woke up from his sleep and started toward the door, still confused. When he was halfway, he turned around and stared at the scene. His wife and Catherine were scolding and comforting. They stumbled here and there among the crowded furniture with things to help. And on the couch was the despairing figure, bleeding freely. She was trying to spread a copy of *Town Tattle* over the tapestry scenes of Versailles. Then Mr. McKee turned and went on out the door. I took my hat from the chandelier and followed.

“Come to lunch some day,” he suggested, as we groaned down in the elevator.

“Where?”

“Anywhere.”

“Keep your hands off the lever,” said the elevator boy sharply.

“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. McKee with dignity, “I didn’t know I was touching it.”

“All right,” I agreed, “I’ll be glad to.”

… I was standing beside his bed, and he was sitting up between the sheets in his underwear. He had a great portfolio in his hands.

“Beauty and the Beast… Loneliness… Old Grocery Horse… Brook’n Bridge…”

Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station. I was staring at the morning *Tribune* and waiting for the four o’clock train.

### Glossary

- **valley of ashes**: a grey area full of ash, the grey powder left after burning, between West Egg and New York
- **oculist**: an eye doctor
- **retinas**: the parts at the back of the eyes that see light
- **drawbridge**: a bridge that can be lifted to let boats pass under it
- **mistress**: a woman who has a secret love affair with a married man
- **torpedoes**: here, small fireworks that explode with a bang when they are hit
- **police dog**: a German shepherd, a large dog often used by the police
- **Airedale**: a kind of dog with a rough brown and black coat
- **bitch**: a female dog; it is also a rude word
- **gyped**: cheated (an old, rude word)
- **kike**: a very offensive word for a Jewish person
- **portfolio**: a large flat case for carrying photographs or pictures

## III

There was music from my neighbour’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths. They moved among the whispers and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests. They dived from the tower of his raft, or lay in the sun on the hot sand of his beach. Meanwhile his two motorboats cut through the waters of the Sound. They pulled aquaplanes over waterfalls of white foam. At weekends his Rolls-Royce became a bus. It carried groups of people to and from the city from nine in the morning until long after midnight. His station wagon hurried to meet all the trains, like a busy yellow bug. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, worked hard all day. They used mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears. They repaired all the damage of the night before.

Every Friday five boxes of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruit seller in New York. Every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door as a pyramid of empty halves. There was a machine in the kitchen. It could get the juice out of two hundred oranges in half an hour. But a butler’s thumb had to press a little button two hundred times.

At least once every two weeks a team of caterers came out from the city. They brought several hundred feet of canvas. They also brought enough coloured lights to turn Gatsby’s enormous garden into a Christmas tree. The buffet tables were decorated with shining hors-d’oeuvre. Spiced baked hams stood close to salads in bright patterns, like a clown’s costume. There were pigs made of pastry, and turkeys cooked to a magical dark gold. In the main hall they set up a bar with a real brass rail. It was full of gins and other strong drinks. There were also sweet drinks called cordials. They were so old-fashioned that most of his women guests were too young to tell them apart.

By seven o’clock the orchestra has arrived. It is not a thin little band of five players. It is a whole crowd of oboes, trombones, saxophones, viols, cornets and piccolos, with low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs. The cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive. Already the halls and salons and verandas are bright with strong colours. There is hair cut short in strange new styles. There are shawls finer than anything people in Castile ever dreamed of. The bar is very busy. Trays of cocktails float through the garden outside, until the air is alive with talk and laughter. There are little hints and jokes, and introductions that people forget at once. Women who never knew each other’s names meet with great excitement.

The lights grow brighter as the earth turns away from the sun. Now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices rises higher. Laughter comes more easily minute by minute. People pour it out freely, at any cheerful word. The groups change more quickly. They grow bigger with new arrivals, then break up and form again in the same moment. Already there are wanderers. These are confident girls who move here and there among the heavier, steadier people. For a sharp, happy moment each one becomes the centre of a group. Then, excited with her success, she glides on. She moves through the changing sea of faces and voices and colour, under the constantly changing light.

Suddenly one of these gypsies, in a dress of trembling opal, takes a cocktail out of the air. She drinks it down quickly for courage. Then she moves her hands like the dancer Frisco and dances out alone on the canvas platform. For a moment everyone is quiet. The orchestra leader kindly changes his rhythm for her. Then there is a burst of talk as a false story goes around. People say she is Gilda Gray’s understudy from the Follies. The party has begun.

I believe that on my first night at Gatsby’s I was one of the few guests with a real invitation. People were not invited—they just went there. They got into cars that carried them out to Long Island. And somehow they ended up at Gatsby’s door. There someone who knew Gatsby introduced them. After that they behaved as people behave at an amusement park. Sometimes they came and went without meeting Gatsby at all. They came for the party with a simple heart, and that simple heart was their ticket.

I had really been invited. Early that Saturday morning a chauffeur in a uniform of robin’s-egg blue crossed my lawn. He brought a surprisingly formal note from his employer. The honour would be entirely Gatsby’s, it said, if I would come to his “little party” that night. He had seen me several times, and had wanted to visit me long before. But “a peculiar combination of circumstances” had prevented it. The note was signed “Jay Gatsby” in grand, royal-looking handwriting.

I dressed in white flannels and went over to his lawn a little after seven. I wandered around, rather uncomfortable, among moving crowds of people I didn’t know. Here and there, though, was a face I had noticed on the train to work. I noticed at once how many young Englishmen were there. They were all well dressed, and they all looked a little hungry. And they were all talking in low, serious voices to solid, rich Americans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or insurance or cars. At least they knew, painfully well, that there was easy money all around them. And they believed it could be theirs for a few words in the right tone.

As soon as I arrived I tried to find my host. I asked two or three people where he was. But they stared at me in great surprise. They said so strongly that they knew nothing about him that I slipped away, ashamed. I went toward the cocktail table. It was the only place in the garden where a man alone could stay without looking purposeless and lonely.

I was on my way to get very drunk, out of pure embarrassment. Then Jordan Baker came out of the house. She stood at the top of the marble steps, leaning back a little. She looked down into the garden with interest, but also with contempt.

Welcome or not, I had to attach myself to someone. Otherwise I would soon start making friendly remarks to strangers who walked past.

“Hello!” I shouted, and walked toward her. My voice seemed unnaturally loud across the garden.

“I thought you might be here,” she answered, without much attention, as I came up. “I remembered you lived next door to—”

She held my hand without feeling, as a promise that she would take care of me in a minute. Then she listened to two girls in twin yellow dresses. They had stopped at the bottom of the steps.

“Hello!” they cried together. “Sorry you didn’t win.”

That was about the golf tournament. She had lost in the finals the week before.

“You don’t know who we are,” said one of the girls in yellow, “but we met you here about a month ago.”

“You’ve dyed your hair since then,” said Jordan. I was shocked, but the girls had already moved on. So her remark went only to the early moon. No doubt the moon had come out of a caterer’s basket, like the supper. With Jordan’s slender golden arm in mine, we went down the steps and walked slowly around the garden. A tray of cocktails floated toward us through the twilight. We sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow and three men. Each man was introduced to us as Mr. Mumble.

“Do you come to these parties often?” Jordan asked the girl next to her.

“The last one was the one I met you at,” answered the girl, in a quick, confident voice. She turned to her friend. “Wasn’t it for you, Lucille?”

It was for Lucille, too.

“I like to come,” Lucille said. “I never care what I do, so I always have a good time. When I was here last, I tore my gown on a chair. And he asked me my name and address. Inside of a week I got a package from Croirier’s with a new evening gown in it.”

“Did you keep it?” asked Jordan.

“Sure I did. I was going to wear it tonight, but it was too big in the bust and had to be altered. It was gas blue with lavender beads. Two hundred and sixty-five dollars.”

“There’s something funny about a fellow that’ll do a thing like that,” said the other girl eagerly. “He doesn’t want any trouble with *any*body.”

“Who doesn’t?” I asked.

“Gatsby. Somebody told me—”

The two girls and Jordan leaned together, as if they were sharing a secret.

“Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.”

A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr. Mumbles leaned forward and listened eagerly.

“I don’t think it’s so much *that*,” said Lucille, who did not believe it. “It’s more that he was a German spy during the war.”

One of the men nodded to show that he agreed.

“I heard that from a man who knew all about him. He grew up with him in Germany,” he told us firmly.

“Oh, no,” said the first girl. “It couldn’t be that, because he was in the American army during the war.” Now we believed her again, and she leaned forward eagerly. “You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man.”

She narrowed her eyes and shivered. Lucille shivered. We all turned and looked around for Gatsby. He made people imagine romantic and secret things about him. Even people who rarely found anything worth whispering about in this world whispered about him.

The first supper was now being served. There would be another one after midnight. Jordan invited me to join her own group. They sat around a table on the other side of the garden. There were three married couples and Jordan’s escort. He was a university student who would not give up. He liked to make rude, violent hints. He clearly believed that sooner or later Jordan would give herself to him, more or less. This group did not wander around. They stayed together, all alike and full of dignity. They acted as if they represented the serious old upper class of the countryside. It was East Egg looking down on West Egg. And they were careful to protect themselves from its bright, many-coloured fun.

“Let’s get out,” Jordan whispered after half an hour. Somehow it had felt wasted and wrong. “This is much too polite for me.”

We got up. She explained to the others that we were going to find the host. I had never met him, she said, and it was making me uneasy. The student nodded in a cynical, sad way.

We looked in the bar first. It was crowded, but Gatsby was not there. She couldn’t find him from the top of the steps, and he wasn’t on the veranda. By chance we tried an important-looking door. We walked into a high Gothic library with walls of carved English oak. It had probably been brought over complete from some old ruin in Europe.

A stout, middle-aged man with enormous owl-eyed glasses was sitting on the edge of a great table. He was rather drunk. He was staring at the shelves of books, trying hard to keep his eyes steady. As we came in, he turned around excitedly and looked at Jordan from head to foot.

“What do you think?” he asked suddenly.

“About what?”

He waved his hand toward the bookshelves.

“About that. In fact, you needn’t bother to find out. I found out. They’re real.”

“The books?”

He nodded.

“Absolutely real—have pages and everything. I thought they’d be nice strong cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. Pages and—Here! Lemme show you.”

He was sure that we didn’t believe him. He rushed to the bookcases and came back with Volume One of the *Stoddard Lectures*.

“See!” he cried proudly. “It’s a real, honest piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. How careful! How realistic! Knew when to stop, too—didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”

He took the book from me and quickly put it back on its shelf. He muttered that if one brick was removed, the whole library might fall down.

“Who brought you?” he asked. “Or did you just come? I was brought. Most people were brought.”

Jordan looked at him brightly and cheerfully, but she didn’t answer.

“I was brought by a woman named Roosevelt,” he went on. “Mrs. Claud Roosevelt. Do you know her? I met her somewhere last night. I’ve been drunk for about a week now. I thought it might make me sober to sit in a library.”

“Has it?”

“A little bit, I think. I can’t tell yet. I’ve only been here an hour. Did I tell you about the books? They’re real. They’re—”

“You told us.”

We shook hands with him seriously and went back outside.

Now there was dancing on the canvas in the garden. Old men pushed young girls backward in endless, clumsy circles. Elegant couples held each other in twisted, fashionable ways and stayed in the corners. Many single girls danced alone. Some of them played the banjo or the drums for a moment, to give the orchestra a rest. By midnight the fun had grown wilder. A famous tenor had sung in Italian, and a contralto with a bad name had sung jazz. Between the songs people were doing “stunts” all over the garden. Happy, empty bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky. A pair of stage twins did a baby act in costume. They turned out to be the girls in yellow. Champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger-bowls. The moon had risen higher. On the Sound floated a triangle of silver scales. It trembled a little to the stiff, thin sound of the banjoes on the lawn.

I was still with Jordan Baker. We were sitting at a table with a man of about my age and a noisy little girl. She burst into uncontrollable laughter at the smallest thing. I was enjoying myself now. I had drunk two finger-bowls of champagne. And the scene in front of my eyes had changed into something important, basic and deep.

When the entertainment paused, the man looked at me and smiled.

“Your face is familiar,” he said politely. “Weren’t you in the First Division during the war?”

“Why, yes. I was in the Twenty-eighth Infantry.”

“I was in the Sixteenth until June nineteen-eighteen. I knew I’d seen you somewhere before.”

We talked for a moment about some wet, grey little villages in France. He clearly lived near here, because he told me he had just bought a hydroplane. He was going to try it out in the morning.

“Want to go with me, old sport? Just near the shore along the Sound.”

“What time?”

“Any time that suits you best.”

I was just about to ask his name when Jordan looked around and smiled.

“Having a gay time now?” she asked.

“Much better.” I turned again to my new friend. “This is an unusual party for me. I haven’t even seen the host. I live over there—” I waved my hand at the hedge far away, which I couldn’t see. “And this man Gatsby sent over his chauffeur with an invitation.”

For a moment he looked at me as if he didn’t understand.

“I’m Gatsby,” he said suddenly.

“What!” I cried. “Oh, I beg your pardon.”

“I thought you knew, old sport. I’m afraid I’m not a very good host.”

He smiled with understanding—much more than understanding. It was one of those rare smiles that make you feel safe forever. You may see a smile like that four or five times in your life. For a moment it faced—or seemed to face—the whole world. Then it turned to *you*, and it was completely on your side. It understood you just as much as you wanted to be understood. It believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself. It told you that it saw you exactly as you hoped to appear, at your very best. At exactly that point the smile vanished. Now I was looking at an elegant young tough guy, a year or two over thirty. His speech was so carefully formal that it was almost ridiculous. Even before he introduced himself, I had felt strongly that he was choosing his words with care.

Almost at the moment when Mr. Gatsby said who he was, a butler hurried toward him. He told him that Chicago was calling him on the telephone. Gatsby excused himself with a small bow to each of us in turn.

“If you want anything, just ask for it, old sport,” he urged me. “Excuse me. I will rejoin you later.”

When he was gone, I turned to Jordan at once. I felt I had to tell her how surprised I was. I had expected Mr. Gatsby to be a red-faced, fat man in middle age.

“Who is he?” I asked. “Do you know?”

“He’s just a man named Gatsby.”

“Where is he from, I mean? And what does he do?”

“Now *you*’re started on the subject,” she answered with a tired smile. “Well, he told me once he was an Oxford man.”

A dim picture of his past started to form behind him. But at her next remark it faded away.

“However, I don’t believe it.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know,” she insisted. “I just don’t think he went there.”

Something in her voice reminded me of the other girl’s “I think he killed a man.” It made me even more curious. I would have believed without question that Gatsby came from the swamps of Louisiana. Or from the poor Lower East Side of New York. I could understand that. But young men didn’t come coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island Sound. At least, in my small-town inexperience, I believed they didn’t.

“Anyhow, he gives large parties,” said Jordan. She changed the subject like a city person who dislikes plain facts. “And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”

There was the boom of a bass drum. Suddenly the voice of the orchestra leader rang out above the noisy talk of the garden.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he cried. “At the request of Mr. Gatsby we are going to play for you Mr. Vladmir Tostoff’s latest work. It attracted so much attention at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the papers, you know there was a big sensation.” He smiled in a jolly, superior way and added, “Some sensation!” At that everybody laughed.

“The piece is known,” he finished loudly, “as ‘Vladmir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World!’ ”

I didn’t follow Mr. Tostoff’s music. Just as it began, my eyes fell on Gatsby. He was standing alone on the marble steps. He was looking from one group to another with approving eyes. His tanned skin was pulled attractively tight over his face. His short hair looked as if it was cut every day. I could see nothing sinister about him. I wondered if not drinking made him different from his guests. It seemed to me that he became more correct as the friendly wild fun grew. When the “Jazz History of the World” was over, girls were putting their heads on men’s shoulders, playfully, like puppies. Girls were falling backward into men’s arms as a joke, even into groups. They knew that someone would catch them. But no one fell backward onto Gatsby. No girl’s short French haircut touched Gatsby’s shoulder. And no singing groups of four were formed with Gatsby’s head as one of the four.

“I beg your pardon.”

Gatsby’s butler was suddenly standing beside us.

“Miss Baker?” he asked. “I beg your pardon, but Mr. Gatsby would like to speak to you alone.”

“With me?” she cried in surprise.

“Yes, madame.”

She got up slowly and raised her eyebrows at me in surprise. Then she followed the butler toward the house. I noticed that she wore her evening dress, and all her dresses, like sports clothes. There was a light, confident swing in her movements. It was as if she had first learned to walk on golf courses on clean, fresh mornings.

I was alone, and it was almost two o’clock. For some time confusing, interesting sounds had come from a long room with many windows above the terrace. Jordan’s student was now having a conversation about childbirth with two chorus girls. He begged me to join him, but I escaped from him and went inside.

The large room was full of people. One of the girls in yellow was playing the piano. Beside her stood a tall, red-haired young lady from a famous chorus, singing. She had drunk a lot of champagne. During her song she had decided, foolishly, that everything was very, very sad. So she was not only singing, she was crying too. Whenever there was a pause in the song, she filled it with broken sobs. Then she began the words again in a high, shaking voice. The tears ran down her cheeks—but not freely. When they touched her heavily painted eyelashes, they turned the colour of ink. Then they went on down her face in slow black little rivers. Someone made a funny suggestion that she should sing the notes on her face. At that she threw up her hands and sank into a chair. She fell into a deep sleep, heavy with wine.

“She had a fight with a man who says he’s her husband,” explained a girl at my elbow.

I looked around. Most of the women who were still there were now having fights with men said to be their husbands. Even Jordan’s group, the four from East Egg, were torn apart by arguments. One of the men was talking with strange intensity to a young actress. At first his wife tried to laugh about it in a dignified, uncaring way. Then she broke down completely and started attacking him from the side. Every now and then she appeared suddenly beside him like an angry diamond. “You promised!” she hissed into his ear.

Not only wild, badly behaved men were unwilling to go home. In the hall at that moment were two sadly sober men and their very angry wives. The wives were agreeing with each other in slightly raised voices.

“Whenever he sees I’m having a good time, he wants to go home.”

“Never heard anything so selfish in my life.”

“We’re always the first ones to leave.”

“So are we.”

“Well, we’re almost the last tonight,” said one of the men, a little ashamed. “The orchestra left half an hour ago.”

The wives agreed that such cruelty was beyond belief. But the argument ended in a short struggle. Both wives were lifted up, kicking, and carried out into the night.

As I waited for my hat in the hall, the door of the library opened. Jordan Baker and Gatsby came out together. He was saying some last word to her. But his eager manner suddenly became stiff and formal as several people came up to say goodbye to him.

Jordan’s group were calling impatiently to her from the porch, but she stayed for a moment to shake hands.

“I’ve just heard the most amazing thing,” she whispered. “How long were we in there?”

“Why, about an hour.”

“It was… simply amazing,” she repeated, as if her mind was somewhere else. “But I swore I wouldn’t tell it, and here I am teasing you.” She yawned gracefully in my face. “Please come and see me… Phone book… Under the name of Mrs. Sigourney Howard… My aunt…” She was hurrying away as she talked. Her brown hand waved a cheerful salute, and she disappeared into her group at the door.

I felt rather ashamed that I had stayed so late on my first visit. I joined the last of Gatsby’s guests, who stood in a group around him. I wanted to explain that I had looked for him early in the evening. I also wanted to apologize for not knowing him in the garden.

“Don’t mention it,” he told me eagerly. “Don’t give it another thought, old sport.” The friendly words were no more personal than the hand that touched my shoulder to calm me. “And don’t forget we’re going up in the hydroplane tomorrow morning, at nine o’clock.”

Then the butler spoke behind his shoulder:

“Philadelphia wants you on the phone, sir.”

“All right, in a minute. Tell them I’ll be right there… Good night.”

“Good night.”

“Good night.” He smiled. Suddenly it seemed pleasant and important to be among the last to go, as if he had wanted it all the time. “Good night, old sport… Good night.”

But as I walked down the steps, I saw that the evening was not quite over. Fifty feet from the door, a dozen headlights lit up a strange, noisy scene. In the ditch beside the road lay a new coupé. It was the right way up, but one wheel had been violently torn off. The car had left Gatsby’s drive less than two minutes before. The sharp corner of a wall had knocked off the wheel. Now half a dozen curious chauffeurs were looking at it with great interest. But they had left their cars in the middle of the road. So for some time the cars behind them had been making a harsh noise with their horns. This added to the wild confusion of the scene.

A man in a long, light coat had climbed out of the wreck. Now he stood in the middle of the road. He looked from the car to the tyre, and from the tyre to the people watching, in a pleasant, puzzled way.

“See!” he explained. “It went in the ditch.”

This fact amazed him endlessly. First I recognized the unusual sense of wonder, and then the man. It was the visitor to Gatsby’s library from earlier that night.

“How’d it happen?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“I know nothing whatever about machines,” he said firmly.

“But how did it happen? Did you run into the wall?”

“Don’t ask me,” said Owl Eyes. He wanted nothing more to do with the whole thing. “I know very little about driving—next to nothing. It happened, and that’s all I know.”

“Well, if you’re a poor driver, you oughtn’t to try driving at night.”

“But I wasn’t even trying,” he explained angrily. “I wasn’t even trying.”

The people standing around fell silent in shock.

“Do you want to commit suicide?”

“You’re lucky it was just a wheel! A bad driver and not even *try*ing!”

“You don’t understand,” explained the guilty man. “I wasn’t driving. There’s another man in the car.”

Everyone was shocked, and the shock came out in a long “Ah-h-h!” as the door of the coupé slowly swung open. The crowd—it was a crowd now—stepped back without meaning to. When the door was wide open, there was a ghostly pause. Then, very slowly, part by part, a pale, loose-limbed person stepped out of the wreck. He felt the ground carefully with a large, unsteady dancing shoe.

The bright headlights blinded him, and the endless noise of the horns confused him. This ghostly figure stood swaying for a moment. Then he noticed the man in the long coat.

“Wha’s matter?” he asked calmly. “Did we run outa gas?”

“Look!”

Half a dozen fingers pointed at the wheel that had come off. He stared at it for a moment. Then he looked up, as if he suspected it had dropped from the sky.

“It came off,” someone explained.

He nodded.

“At first I din’ notice we’d stopped.”

There was a pause. Then he took a long breath, straightened his shoulders and spoke in a determined voice.

“Wonder’ff tell me where there’s a gas’line station?”

At least a dozen men explained to him that the wheel and the car were no longer joined together in any way. Some of them were only a little less drunk than he was.

“Back out,” he suggested after a moment. “Put her in reverse.”

“But the *wheel*’s off!”

He hesitated.

“No harm in trying,” he said.

The screaming horns were now at their loudest. I turned away and walked across the lawn toward home. I looked back once. A thin, flat moon was shining over Gatsby’s house. It made the night as fine as before. It was still there after the laughter and the sound of his glowing garden. A sudden emptiness now seemed to flow from the windows and the great doors. It left the host completely alone. He stood on the porch with his hand up in a formal gesture of goodbye.

Reading over what I have written so far, I see that I have given the wrong impression. It seems that the events of three nights, several weeks apart, were all that filled my mind. In fact they were just casual events in a busy summer. Until much later, they interested me far less than my own personal affairs.

Most of the time I worked. In the early morning the sun threw my shadow to the west as I hurried to the Probity Trust. I walked between the tall white buildings of lower New York, which stood like the walls of deep valleys. I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by their first names. I had lunch with them in dark, crowded restaurants. We ate little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and drank coffee. I even had a short affair with a girl from Jersey City who worked in the accounting department. But her brother began to give me mean looks. So when she went on her vacation in July, I let it quietly end.

I usually had dinner at the Yale Club. For some reason it was the gloomiest part of my day. Then I went upstairs to the library. There I studied investments and securities for an hour, very seriously. There were usually a few noisy young men around, but they never came into the library. So it was a good place to work. After that, if the night was soft and warm, I walked slowly down Madison Avenue. I passed the old Murray Hill Hotel and went over 33rd Street to the Pennsylvania Station.

I began to like New York. I liked its exciting, adventurous feeling at night. My restless eye enjoyed the constant flicker of men and women and machines. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd. I imagined that in a few minutes I was going to enter their lives. And no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets. They turned and smiled back at me. Then they disappeared through a door into warm darkness. In the magical twilight of the big city, I sometimes felt a haunting loneliness. I felt it in others too. I saw poor young clerks who waited around in front of shop windows. They were waiting until it was time for a lonely dinner in a restaurant. They were young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most beautiful and painful moments of night and life.

And again at eight o’clock I felt a sinking in my heart. At that hour the dark streets of the Forties were full of taxis, five deep, with their engines beating. They were all going to the theatre district. People leaned together in the taxis as they waited. Voices sang, and there was laughter at jokes I couldn’t hear. Lighted cigarettes made strange circles inside. I imagined that I, too, was hurrying toward fun and sharing their private excitement. And I wished them well.

For a while I lost sight of Jordan Baker. Then in midsummer I found her again. At first I was proud to go places with her, because she was a golf champion and everyone knew her name. Then it was something more. I wasn’t really in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity. She showed the world a bored, proud face, and that face hid something. Most false manners hide something in the end, even if they don’t at the beginning. One day I found out what it was. We were at a house-party together up in Warwick. She left a borrowed car out in the rain with the top down, and then she lied about it. Suddenly I remembered the story about her that I had forgotten that night at Daisy’s. At her first big golf tournament there was a quarrel that nearly reached the newspapers. Someone suggested that she had moved her ball from a bad position in the semifinal round. The thing nearly became a scandal—then it died away. A caddy took back what he had said. And the only other witness admitted that he might have been wrong. But the incident and her name had stayed together in my mind.

Jordan Baker always avoided clever, sharp men, without thinking about it. Now I saw why. She felt safer among people who would never imagine that anyone could break the rules. She was incurably dishonest. She couldn’t bear to be at a disadvantage. Because of this, I suppose, she had begun to use tricks when she was very young. In that way she could keep her cool, rude smile turned to the world. And at the same time she could satisfy the needs of her hard, lively body.

It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply. I was a little sorry, and then I forgot. It was at that same house-party that we had a strange conversation about driving a car. It started because she drove so close to some workmen that our fender hit a button on one man’s coat.

“You’re a rotten driver,” I protested. “Either you ought to be more careful, or you oughtn’t to drive at all.”

“I am careful.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Well, other people are,” she said lightly.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“They’ll keep out of my way,” she insisted. “It takes two to make an accident.”

“Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.”

“I hope I never will,” she answered. “I hate careless people. That’s why I like you.”

Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead. But she had changed our relationship on purpose, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I think slowly, and I am full of inner rules that act as brakes on my desires. I knew that first I had to get myself completely out of that tangle back home. I had been writing letters there once a week and signing them “Love, Nick.” But all I could think of was one thing about that certain girl. When she played tennis, a faint moustache of sweat appeared on her upper lip. Still, there was a vague understanding between us. I had to end it politely before I was free.

Everyone believes he has at least one of the great virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

### Glossary

- **moths**: insects like butterflies that fly at night towards lights.
- **aquaplanes**: boards pulled behind motorboats; people stand or lie on them.
- **caterers**: people whose job is to bring food and drink to a party.
- **hors-d’oeuvre**: small dishes of food served before the main meal.
- **understudy**: a performer who learns a star’s part so that he or she can replace the star.
- **escort**: a man who goes with a woman to a party or other event.
- **a regular Belasco**: like Belasco, a theatre producer famous for very realistic stage sets.
- **hydroplane**: a plane that can take off from water and land on it.
- **old sport**: Gatsby’s friendly, upper-class way of saying “my friend”.
- **ditch**: a long, narrow hole at the side of a road.
- **incurably dishonest**: so dishonest that she can never change.

## IV

On Sunday morning church bells rang in the villages along the shore. At the same time the whole fashionable world, with its lovers, came back to Gatsby’s house. They sparkled and laughed on his lawn.

“He’s a bootlegger,” said the young ladies. They moved about somewhere between his cocktails and his flowers. “One time he killed a man. The man had found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil. Reach me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that there crystal glass.”

Once I took a train timetable and wrote on its empty spaces. I wrote down the names of the people who came to Gatsby’s house that summer. It is an old timetable now, and it is falling apart at the folds. At the top it says “This schedule in effect July 5th, 1922.” But I can still read the grey names. They will give you a better picture than my general remarks. These were the people who accepted Gatsby’s hospitality. In return they paid him a strange, quiet compliment: they knew nothing whatever about him.

From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches. There was a man named Bunsen, whom I knew at Yale. There was Doctor Webster Civet, who was drowned last summer up in Maine. And there were the Hornbeams and the Willie Voltaires. There was a whole clan named Blackbuck. They always gathered in a corner and turned up their noses like goats at anyone who came near. And there were the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr. Chrystie’s wife). And there was Edgar Beaver. People say his hair turned cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all.

Clarence Endive was from East Egg, I remember. He came only once, in white knickerbockers. He had a fight in the garden with a bum named Etty. From farther out on the Island came the Cheadles and the O. R. P. Schraeders. There were the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of Georgia, and the Fishguards and the Ripley Snells. Snell was there three days before he went to prison. He was so drunk out on the gravel drive that Mrs. Ulysses Swett’s car ran over his right hand. The Dancies came too, and S. B. Whitebait, who was well over sixty. And Maurice A. Flink, and the Hammerheads, and Beluga the tobacco importer, and Beluga’s girls.

From West Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys and Cecil Roebuck and Cecil Schoen. There was Gulick the State senator. There was Newton Orchid, who controlled Films Par Excellence. Then there were Eckhaust and Clyde Cohen and Don S. Schwartz (the son) and Arthur McCarty. They were all connected with the movies in one way or another. And there were the Catlips and the Bembergs. And G. Earl Muldoon, brother of that Muldoon who later strangled his wife. Da Fontano the promoter came there. So did Ed Legros and James B. (“Rot-Gut”) Ferret and the De Jongs and Ernest Lilly. They came to gamble. When Ferret wandered into the garden, it meant he had lost all his money. Then the next day the shares of Associated Traction would have to move up and down, so that he could make a profit.

A man named Klipspringer was there so often that people called him “the boarder.” I doubt if he had any other home. From the theatre there were Gus Waize and Horace O’Donavan and Lester Myer. And there were George Duckweed and Francis Bull. Also from New York were the Chromes and the Backhyssons and the Dennickers and Russel Betty. There were the Corrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewars and the Scullys and S. W. Belcher. There were the Smirkes and the young Quinns, who are divorced now. And there was Henry L. Palmetto, who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square.

Benny McClenahan always arrived with four girls. They were never quite the same girls in person. But they were so alike that they always seemed to have been there before. I have forgotten their names. Jaqueline, I think, or else Consuela, or Gloria or Judy or June. Their last names were either the musical names of flowers and months, or the harder names of great American capitalists. If you pressed them, they would admit that they were cousins of these rich men.

As well as all these, I can remember Faustina O’Brien, who came at least once. There were the Baedeker girls, and young Brewer, who had his nose shot off in the war. There were Mr. Albrucksburger and Miss Haag, his fiancée, and Ardita Fitz-Peters. There was Mr. P. Jewett, once head of the American Legion. There was Miss Claudia Hip, with a man people said was her chauffeur. And there was a prince of something, whom we called Duke. If I ever knew his name, I have forgotten it.

All these people came to Gatsby’s house in the summer.

At nine o’clock one morning late in July, Gatsby’s gorgeous car came bumping up the rocky drive to my door. Its three-note horn played a burst of music.

It was the first time he had visited me. But I had been to two of his parties and gone up in his hydroplane. And, because he urged me to, I had often used his beach.

“Good morning, old sport. You’re having lunch with me today and I thought we’d ride up together.”

He was balancing on the dashboard of his car. He moved with that easy, clever skill that is so typically American. I suppose it comes from not doing heavy lifting work when you are young. It comes even more from the loose grace of our nervous, irregular games. This quality kept breaking through his very correct manners in the form of restlessness. He was never quite still. There was always a foot tapping somewhere, or a hand impatiently opening and closing.

He saw me looking at his car with admiration.

“It’s pretty, isn’t it, old sport?” He jumped off to give me a better view. “Haven’t you ever seen it before?”

I’d seen it. Everybody had seen it. It was a rich cream colour, bright with nickel. It was monstrously long, and here and there it swelled out with proud hatboxes and supper-boxes and toolboxes. It had a maze of windshields, rising in steps, that reflected a dozen suns. We sat down behind many layers of glass, in a sort of green leather greenhouse, and we started for town.

I had talked with him perhaps half a dozen times in the past month. To my disappointment, I had found that he had little to say. At first I had thought he was a person of some unknown importance. But that impression had slowly faded. He had become simply the owner of a fancy roadhouse next door.

And then came that disturbing ride. We hadn’t reached West Egg village yet when Gatsby began to leave his elegant sentences unfinished. He kept slapping himself, unsure, on the knee of his caramel-coloured suit.

“Look here, old sport,” he burst out surprisingly. “What’s your opinion of me, anyhow?”

I felt a little overwhelmed. I began to give the vague, general answers that such a question deserves.

“Well, I’m going to tell you something about my life,” he interrupted. “I don’t want you to get a wrong idea of me from all these stories you hear.”

So he knew about the strange accusations that people enjoyed talking about in his halls.

“I’ll tell you God’s truth.” His right hand rose suddenly, as if he was asking God to stand ready to punish him. “I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West—all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford. All my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition.”

He looked at me sideways. And I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was lying. He hurried over the words “educated at Oxford.” Or he swallowed them, or choked on them, as if they had troubled him before. With this doubt, his whole story fell to pieces. I wondered if there wasn’t something a little sinister about him, after all.

“What part of the Middle West?” I asked casually.

“San Francisco.”

“I see.”

“My family all died and I came into a good deal of money.”

His voice was serious and sad. It was as if the memory of his whole family suddenly dying still haunted him. For a moment I suspected that he was joking with me. But one look at him told me he was not.

“After that I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe—Paris, Venice, Rome. I collected jewels, chiefly rubies. I hunted big game, and painted a little, things for myself only. And I tried to forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago.”

With an effort I stopped myself from laughing in disbelief. The phrases were so old and worn that they brought only one picture to my mind. It was a cheap storybook “character” in a turban, leaking sawdust from every hole. He was chasing a tiger through the Bois de Boulogne.

“Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die. But I seemed to have a magic life. I accepted a commission as first lieutenant when it began. In the Argonne Forest I took what was left of my machine-gun battalion very far forward. There was a half-mile gap on each side of us, where the infantry couldn’t advance. We stayed there two days and two nights, a hundred and thirty men with sixteen Lewis guns. When the infantry came up at last, they found the badges of three German divisions among the piles of dead. I was promoted to be a major, and every Allied government gave me a decoration. Even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!”

Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them, with his smile. The smile seemed to understand Montenegro’s troubled history. It felt for the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. It fully understood the chain of national events behind this honour from Montenegro’s warm little heart. Now my disbelief was lost in fascination. It was like looking quickly through a dozen magazines.

He put his hand in his pocket, and a piece of metal on a ribbon fell into my palm.

“That’s the one from Montenegro.”

To my surprise, the thing looked real. “Orderi di Danilo,” said the words around the edge, “Montenegro, Nicolas Rex.”

“Turn it.”

“Major Jay Gatsby,” I read, “For Valour Extraordinary.”

“Here’s another thing I always carry. A souvenir of Oxford days. It was taken in Trinity Quad—the man on my left is now the Earl of Doncaster.”

It was a photograph of half a dozen young men in blazers. They were standing lazily in an archway. Through it you could see a great many church towers. There was Gatsby, looking a little younger—not much—with a cricket bat in his hand.

Then it was all true. I saw the skins of tigers, bright as flames, in his palace on the Grand Canal. I saw him opening a chest of rubies. Their deep red light eased the pain of his broken heart.

“I’m going to make a big request of you today,” he said. He put his souvenirs back in his pocket with satisfaction. “So I thought you ought to know something about me. I didn’t want you to think I was just some nobody. You see, I usually find myself among strangers. That’s because I drift here and there, trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.” He hesitated. “You’ll hear about it this afternoon.”

“At lunch?”

“No, this afternoon. I happened to find out that you’re taking Miss Baker to tea.”

“Do you mean you’re in love with Miss Baker?”

“No, old sport, I’m not. But Miss Baker has kindly agreed to speak to you about this matter.”

I didn’t have the faintest idea what “this matter” was. But I was more annoyed than interested. I hadn’t invited Jordan to tea to talk about Mr. Jay Gatsby. I was sure the request would be something completely crazy. For a moment I was sorry I had ever set foot on his overcrowded lawn.

He wouldn’t say another word. He grew more and more correct as we came near the city. We passed Port Roosevelt, where we caught sight of ocean-going ships with red bands. We raced along a poor street of rough stones. It was lined with dark saloons from the faded golden days of the early nineteen-hundreds, and they still had customers. Then the valley of ashes opened out on both sides of us. As we went by, I had a glimpse of Mrs. Wilson. She was working hard at the garage pump, panting and full of life.

With fenders spread like wings, we threw light through half of Astoria. Only half—because as we twisted among the pillars of the elevated railway, I heard a familiar sound. It was the “jug-jug-*spat*!” of a motorcycle. A frantic policeman rode up beside us.

“All right, old sport,” called Gatsby. We slowed down. He took a white card from his wallet and waved it in front of the man’s eyes.

“Right you are,” agreed the policeman, touching his cap. “Know you next time, Mr. Gatsby. Excuse *me*!”

“What was that?” I asked. “The picture of Oxford?”

“I was able to do the commissioner a favour once, and he sends me a Christmas card every year.”

Then we went over the great bridge. The sunlight came through the steel beams and made a constant flicker on the moving cars. Across the river the city rose up in white heaps and sugar lumps. It had all been built with a wish, out of money that had no smell. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time. It holds its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

A dead man passed us in a hearse piled high with flowers. Two carriages followed with their blinds pulled down. Then came more cheerful carriages for friends. The friends looked out at us with the tragic eyes and short upper lips of southeastern Europe. I was glad that they could see Gatsby’s splendid car on their sad holiday. As we crossed Blackwell’s Island, a limousine passed us. It was driven by a white chauffeur, and in it sat three fashionable negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yellowish whites of their eyes rolled toward us in proud rivalry.

“Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge,” I thought. “Anything at all…”

Even Gatsby could happen, and it would be no special surprise.

Roaring noon. I met Gatsby for lunch in a cellar restaurant on Forty-second Street, cooled by many fans. My eyes were still full of the brightness of the street outside. I blinked and found him dimly in the entrance room, talking to another man.

“Mr. Carraway, this is my friend Mr. Wolfshiem.”

A small, flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and looked at me. Two fine growths of hair grew richly in his nostrils. After a moment I found his tiny eyes in the half-darkness.

“—So I took one look at him,” said Mr. Wolfshiem, shaking my hand seriously, “and what do you think I did?”

“What?” I asked politely.

But clearly he was not talking to me. He dropped my hand and turned his expressive nose on Gatsby.

“I handed the money to Katspaugh and I said: ‘All right, Katspaugh, don’t pay him a penny till he shuts his mouth.’ He shut it then and there.”

Gatsby took an arm of each of us and moved forward into the restaurant. At that, Mr. Wolfshiem swallowed a new sentence he was starting. He fell into a dreamy silence, like a sleepwalker.

“Highballs?” asked the head waiter.

“This is a nice restaurant here,” said Mr. Wolfshiem. He was looking at the painted, very proper-looking nymphs on the ceiling. “But I like across the street better!”

“Yes, highballs,” agreed Gatsby. Then he said to Mr. Wolfshiem, “It’s too hot over there.”

“Hot and small—yes,” said Mr. Wolfshiem, “but full of memories.”

“What place is that?” I asked.

“The old Metropole.”

“The old Metropole,” said Mr. Wolfshiem, thinking gloomily. “Filled with faces dead and gone. Filled with friends gone now forever. I can’t forget so long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there. It was six of us at the table, and Rosy had eat and drunk a lot all evening. When it was almost morning, the waiter came up to him with a funny look. He says somebody wants to speak to him outside. ‘All right,’ says Rosy, and begins to get up, and I pulled him down in his chair.

“ ‘Let the bastards come in here if they want you, Rosy, but don’t you, so help me, move outside this room.’

“It was four o’clock in the morning then. If we’d of raised the blinds, we’d of seen daylight.”

“Did he go?” I asked innocently.

“Sure he went.” Mr. Wolfshiem’s nose flashed at me angrily. “He turned around in the door and says: ‘Don’t let that waiter take away my coffee!’ Then he went out on the sidewalk. And they shot him three times in his full belly and drove away.”

“Four of them were electrocuted,” I said, remembering.

“Five, with Becker.” His nostrils turned to me with interest. “I understand you’re looking for a business gonnegtion.”

These two remarks, one right after the other, were shocking. Gatsby answered for me:

“Oh, no,” he cried, “this isn’t the man.”

“No?” Mr. Wolfshiem seemed disappointed.

“This is just a friend. I told you we’d talk about that some other time.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Wolfshiem. “I had a wrong man.”

A rich, juicy hash arrived. Mr. Wolfshiem forgot the more sentimental atmosphere of the old Metropole. He began to eat, fiercely but delicately. Meanwhile his eyes moved very slowly all around the room. He finished the circle by turning to look at the people directly behind him. I think that if I hadn’t been there, he would have taken one short look under our own table too.

“Look here, old sport,” said Gatsby, leaning toward me. “I’m afraid I made you a little angry this morning in the car.”

There was the smile again, but this time I didn’t let it win me over.

“I don’t like mysteries,” I answered. “And I don’t understand why you won’t come out frankly and tell me what you want. Why has it all got to come through Miss Baker?”

“Oh, it’s nothing underhand,” he promised me. “Miss Baker’s a great sportswoman, you know, and she’d never do anything that wasn’t all right.”

Suddenly he looked at his watch, jumped up and hurried from the room. He left me with Mr. Wolfshiem at the table.

“He has to telephone,” said Mr. Wolfshiem, following him with his eyes. “Fine fellow, isn’t he? Handsome to look at and a perfect gentleman.”

“Yes.”

“He’s an Oggsford man.”

“Oh!”

“He went to Oggsford College in England. You know Oggsford College?”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“It’s one of the most famous colleges in the world.”

“Have you known Gatsby for a long time?” I asked.

“Several years,” he answered, pleased. “I made the pleasure of his acquaintance just after the war. But I knew I had discovered a man of fine breeding after I talked with him an hour. I said to myself: ‘There’s the kind of man you’d like to take home and introduce to your mother and sister.’ ” He paused. “I see you’re looking at my cuff buttons.”

I hadn’t been looking at them, but I did now. They were made of pieces of ivory that looked strangely familiar.

“Finest specimens of human molars,” he told me.

“Well!” I looked at them closely. “That’s a very interesting idea.”

“Yeah.” He pushed his sleeves up under his coat. “Yeah, Gatsby’s very careful about women. He would never so much as look at a friend’s wife.”

Then the man he trusted so completely came back to the table and sat down. Mr. Wolfshiem drank his coffee in one quick movement and stood up.

“I have enjoyed my lunch,” he said, “and I’m going to run off from you two young men before I outstay my welcome.”

“Don’t hurry Meyer,” said Gatsby, without enthusiasm. Mr. Wolfshiem raised his hand, as if he was blessing us.

“You’re very polite, but I belong to another generation,” he said seriously. “You sit here and discuss your sports and your young ladies and your—” He waved his hand again in place of a missing word. “As for me, I am fifty years old, and I won’t impose myself on you any longer.”

As he shook hands and turned away, his tragic nose was trembling. I wondered if I had said anything to offend him.

“He becomes very sentimental sometimes,” explained Gatsby. “This is one of his sentimental days. He’s quite a character around New York—a well-known face on Broadway.”

“Who is he, anyhow, an actor?”

“No.”

“A dentist?”

“Meyer Wolfshiem? No, he’s a gambler.” Gatsby hesitated, then added coolly, “He’s the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919.”

“Fixed the World’s Series?” I repeated.

The idea shocked me. Of course I remembered that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919. But if I had thought about it at all, I would have thought of it as something that just *happened*. It was the end of some chain of events that nobody could stop. It had never come into my mind that one man could play with the faith of fifty million people. And he did it with the single purpose of a burglar blowing open a safe.

“How did he happen to do that?” I asked after a minute.

“He just saw the opportunity.”

“Why isn’t he in jail?”

“They can’t get him, old sport. He’s a smart man.”

I insisted on paying the bill. As the waiter brought my change, I saw Tom Buchanan across the crowded room.

“Come along with me for a minute,” I said. “I’ve got to say hello to someone.”

When he saw us, Tom jumped up and took half a dozen steps toward us.

“Where’ve you been?” he asked eagerly. “Daisy’s furious because you haven’t called up.”

“This is Mr. Gatsby, Mr. Buchanan.”

They shook hands briefly. A strained, unfamiliar look of embarrassment came over Gatsby’s face.

“How’ve you been, anyhow?” Tom asked me. “How’d you happen to come up this far to eat?”

“I’ve been having lunch with Mr. Gatsby.”

I turned toward Mr. Gatsby, but he was no longer there.

One October day in nineteen-seventeen—

(said Jordan Baker that afternoon. She was sitting up very straight on a straight chair in the tea-garden at the Plaza Hotel.)

—I was walking from one place to another, half on the sidewalks and half on the lawns. I was happier on the lawns. I had on shoes from England with rubber knobs on the bottom, and they bit into the soft ground. I also had on a new plaid skirt that blew a little in the wind. Whenever this happened, the red, white and blue flags in front of all the houses stretched out stiff. They said *tut-tut-tut-tut*, as if they disapproved.

The largest of the flags and the largest of the lawns belonged to Daisy Fay’s house. She was just eighteen, two years older than me. She was by far the most popular of all the young girls in Louisville. She dressed in white, and she had a little white roadster. All day long the telephone rang in her house. Excited young officers from Camp Taylor asked for the honour of having her all to themselves that night. “Anyways, for an hour!”

That morning I came to the place opposite her house. Her white roadster was beside the kerb, and she was sitting in it with a lieutenant I had never seen before. They were so interested in each other that she didn’t see me until I was five feet away.

“Hello, Jordan,” she called unexpectedly. “Please come here.”

I was flattered that she wanted to speak to me. Of all the older girls, I admired her most. She asked me if I was going to the Red Cross to make bandages. I was. Well, then, would I tell them that she couldn’t come that day? While she was speaking, the officer looked at Daisy. He looked at her in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime. It seemed romantic to me, so I have remembered it ever since. His name was Jay Gatsby. I didn’t see him again for over four years. Even after I’d met him on Long Island, I didn’t realize it was the same man.

That was nineteen-seventeen. By the next year I had a few boyfriends myself, and I began to play in tournaments. So I didn’t see Daisy very often. She went around with a slightly older crowd—when she went with anyone at all. Wild rumours were going around about her. People said her mother had found her packing her bag one winter night. She wanted to go to New York and say goodbye to a soldier who was going overseas. Her family stopped her. But for several weeks she didn’t speak to them. After that she didn’t go out with the soldiers any more. She went only with a few flat-footed, short-sighted young men in town who couldn’t get into the army.

By the next autumn she was gay again, as gay as ever. She had a début after the armistice. In February she was probably engaged to a man from New Orleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago. The wedding was grander and more splendid than anything Louisville had ever seen. He came down with a hundred people in four private railway cars. He hired a whole floor of the Muhlbach Hotel. And the day before the wedding he gave her a string of pearls worth three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

I was a bridesmaid. I came into her room half an hour before the bridal dinner. I found her lying on her bed in her flowered dress. She was as lovely as the June night—and as drunk as a monkey. She had a bottle of Sauterne in one hand and a letter in the other.

“ ’Gratulate me,” she muttered. “Never had a drink before, but oh how I do enjoy it.”

“What’s the matter, Daisy?”

I was scared, I can tell you. I’d never seen a girl like that before.

“Here, dearies.” She felt around in a wastebasket that she had with her on the bed. She pulled out the string of pearls. “Take ’em downstairs and give ’em back to whoever they belong to. Tell ’em all Daisy’s change’ her mine. Say: ‘Daisy’s change’ her mine!’ ”

She began to cry—she cried and cried. I rushed out and found her mother’s maid. We locked the door and got her into a cold bath. She wouldn’t let go of the letter. She took it into the bath with her and squeezed it into a wet ball. She only let me leave it in the soap-dish when she saw that it was coming to pieces like snow.

But she didn’t say another word. We gave her spirits of ammonia and put ice on her forehead. We hooked her back into her dress. Half an hour later, when we walked out of the room, the pearls were around her neck. The incident was over. Next day at five o’clock she married Tom Buchanan without even a shiver. Then they left on a three months’ trip to the South Seas.

I saw them in Santa Barbara when they came back. I thought I’d never seen a girl so crazy about her husband. If he left the room for a minute, she’d look around uneasily and say, “Where’s Tom gone?” She looked lost and far away until she saw him coming in the door. She used to sit on the sand for hours with his head in her lap. She rubbed her fingers over his eyes and looked at him with a joy too deep to understand. It was touching to see them together. It made you laugh in a quiet, fascinated way. That was in August. A week after I left Santa Barbara, Tom ran into a wagon on the Ventura road one night. He ripped a front wheel off his car. The girl who was with him got into the papers, too, because her arm was broken. She was one of the chambermaids in the Santa Barbara Hotel.

The next April Daisy had her little girl, and they went to France for a year. I saw them one spring in Cannes, and later in Deauville. Then they came back to Chicago to settle down. Daisy was popular in Chicago, as you know. They went around with a fast crowd, all young and rich and wild. But she came out of it with an absolutely perfect reputation. Perhaps that’s because she doesn’t drink. It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can keep quiet about things. And you can choose the right time for any little misbehaviour of your own. Then everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care. Perhaps Daisy never went in for love affairs at all—and yet there’s something in that voice of hers…

Well, about six weeks ago, she heard the name Gatsby for the first time in years. It was when I asked you—do you remember?—if you knew Gatsby in West Egg. After you had gone home, she came into my room and woke me up. She said, “What Gatsby?” I described him—I was half asleep. Then she said in the strangest voice that it must be the man she used to know. It wasn’t until then that I connected this Gatsby with the officer in her white car.

When Jordan Baker had finished telling all this, we had left the Plaza half an hour before. We were driving in a victoria through Central Park. The sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in the West Fifties. Children had already gathered like crickets on the grass. Their clear voices rose through the hot twilight:

“I’m the Sheik of Araby. Your love belongs to me. At night when you’re asleep Into your tent I’ll creep—”

“It was a strange coincidence,” I said.

“But it wasn’t a coincidence at all.”

“Why not?”

“Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay.”

So it was not only the stars he had reached for on that June night. Suddenly he came alive to me. It was as if he was suddenly born out of all his purposeless splendour.

“He wants to know,” Jordan went on, “if you’ll invite Daisy to your house some afternoon and then let him come over.”

The modesty of the request shook me. He had waited five years. He had bought a mansion, where he gave out starlight to moths who came and went. And he had done all that so he could “come over” some afternoon to a stranger’s garden.

“Did I have to know all this before he could ask such a little thing?”

“He’s afraid, he’s waited so long. He thought you might be offended. You see, he’s regular tough underneath it all.”

Something worried me.

“Why didn’t he ask you to arrange a meeting?”

“He wants her to see his house,” she explained. “And your house is right next door.”

“Oh!”

“I think he half expected her to wander into one of his parties some night,” Jordan went on. “But she never did. Then he began asking people casually if they knew her. I was the first one he found. It was that night he sent for me at his dance. You should have heard the long, careful way he worked up to it. Of course, I immediately suggested a lunch in New York—and I thought he’d go mad:

“ ‘I don’t want to do anything out of the way!’ he kept saying. ‘I want to see her right next door.’

“When I said you were a particular friend of Tom’s, he started to give up the whole idea. He doesn’t know very much about Tom. But he says he’s read a Chicago paper for years, just in case he might see Daisy’s name.”

It was dark now. As we went down under a little bridge, I put my arm around Jordan’s golden shoulder. I drew her toward me and asked her to dinner. Suddenly I wasn’t thinking of Daisy and Gatsby any more. I was thinking of this clean, hard, limited person, who doubted everything and everyone. She leaned back lightly, just inside the circle of my arm. A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of dizzy excitement: “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.”

“And Daisy ought to have something in her life,” Jordan said softly to me.

“Does she want to see Gatsby?”

“She’s not to know about it. Gatsby doesn’t want her to know. You’re just supposed to invite her to tea.”

We passed a wall of dark trees. Then the front of the buildings on Fifty-Ninth Street, a block of soft pale light, shone down into the park. Gatsby and Tom Buchanan each had a girl whose face floated, without a body, along the dark rooftops and blinding signs. I had no girl like that. So I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her pale, scornful mouth smiled. So I drew her up again, closer, this time to my face.

### Glossary

- **bootlegger**: a person who makes or sells alcohol illegally.
- **timetable**: a list that shows when trains leave and arrive.
- **knickerbockers**: short, loose trousers that end just below the knee.
- **roadhouse**: a restaurant or bar beside a country road, often with music and dancing.
- **rajah**: an Indian prince or king.
- **commission**: an official position as an officer in the army.
- **decoration**: a medal given to a soldier for bravery.
- **gonnegtion**: Wolfshiem’s way of saying “connection”; here, a partner for dishonest business.
- **molars**: the big teeth at the back of the mouth.
- **fixed the World’s Series**: paid players so that the big baseball championship had a planned result.
- **bridesmaid**: a girl or woman who helps the bride at a wedding.
- **victoria**: a light carriage pulled by a horse.

## V

When I came home to West Egg that night, I was afraid for a moment that my house was on fire. It was two o’clock, and the whole corner of the peninsula was bright with light. The light fell strangely on the bushes and made thin, long shines on the wires by the road. When I turned a corner, I saw that it was Gatsby’s house. It was lit from the tower down to the cellar.

At first I thought it was another party. Perhaps a wild crowd had started playing “hide-and-go-seek” or “sardines-in-the-box”, with the whole house open for the game. But there wasn’t a sound. There was only wind in the trees. It moved the wires and made the lights go off and on again, as if the house had winked into the darkness. As my taxi drove noisily away, I saw Gatsby walking toward me across his lawn.

“Your place looks like the World’s Fair,” I said.

“Does it?” He turned his eyes toward it, but he wasn’t really thinking about it. “I have been looking into some of the rooms. Let’s go to Coney Island, old sport. In my car.”

“It’s too late.”

“Well, suppose we jump into the swimming pool? I haven’t used it all summer.”

“I’ve got to go to bed.”

“All right.”

He waited. He looked at me, and I could see that he was eager but was trying to hide it.

“I talked with Miss Baker,” I said after a moment. “I’m going to call Daisy tomorrow and invite her over here to tea.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” he said, as if it didn’t matter much. “I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

“What day would suit you?”

“What day would suit *you*?” he corrected me quickly. “I don’t want to put you to any trouble, you see.”

“How about the day after tomorrow?”

He thought about it for a moment. Then he said, unwillingly, “I want to get the grass cut.”

We both looked down at the grass. There was a sharp line where my rough, untidy lawn ended and his darker, well-kept lawn began. I suspected that he meant my grass.

“There’s another little thing,” he said uncertainly, and then he stopped.

“Would you rather wait a few days?” I asked.

“Oh, it isn’t about that. At least—” He started several times and stopped each time. “Why, I thought—why, look here, old sport, you don’t make much money, do you?”

“Not very much.”

This seemed to make him feel better, and he went on more confidently.

“I thought you didn’t, if you’ll pardon my—you see, I have a little business on the side, a sort of side line, you understand. And I thought that if you don’t make very much—You’re selling bonds, aren’t you, old sport?”

“Trying to.”

“Well, this would interest you. It wouldn’t take up much of your time, and you might make a nice bit of money. It happens to be a rather secret sort of thing.”

I understand now that this conversation might have been one of the turning points of my life. Things might have been different. But the offer was clearly a payment for the help I was giving him. He offered it without any tact. So I had no choice. I had to stop him there.

“I’ve got my hands full,” I said. “Thank you very much, but I couldn’t take on any more work.”

“You wouldn’t have to do any business with Wolfshiem.” He clearly thought that I was afraid of the “gonnegtion” that was mentioned at lunch. But I told him he was wrong. He waited a moment longer. He hoped I would start a conversation. But I was too busy with my own thoughts to answer him. So he went home, unwillingly.

The evening had made me light-headed and happy. I think I walked into a deep sleep as soon as I came through my front door. So I don’t know if Gatsby went to Coney Island or not. I also don’t know for how many hours he “looked into rooms” while his house blazed brightly on. The next morning I called Daisy from the office and invited her to come to tea.

“Don’t bring Tom,” I warned her.

“What?”

“Don’t bring Tom.”

“Who is ‘Tom’?” she asked innocently.

On the day we had agreed on, it was pouring with rain. At eleven o’clock a man in a raincoat knocked at my front door. He was pulling a lawn-mower behind him. He said that Mr. Gatsby had sent him over to cut my grass. This reminded me that I had forgotten to tell my Finn to come back. So I drove into West Egg village to look for her among the wet, white-painted little streets. I also wanted to buy some cups, lemons and flowers.

I didn’t need the flowers. At two o’clock a whole greenhouse of flowers arrived from Gatsby’s, with countless pots and vases to hold them. An hour later the front door opened nervously, and Gatsby hurried in. He wore a white flannel suit, a silver shirt and a gold-coloured tie. He was pale, and there were dark marks under his eyes from lack of sleep.

“Is everything all right?” he asked immediately.

“The grass looks fine, if that’s what you mean.”

“What grass?” he asked with an empty look. “Oh, the grass in the yard.” He looked out of the window at it. But from his face, I don’t believe he saw a thing.

“Looks very good,” he said vaguely. “One of the papers said they thought the rain would stop about four. I think it was *The Journal*. Have you got everything you need in the way of—of tea?”

I took him into the pantry. There he looked at the Finn a little as if he blamed her for something. Together we looked carefully at the twelve lemon cakes from the delicatessen.

“Will they do?” I asked.

“Of course, of course! They’re fine!” And then he added, in an empty voice, “… old sport.”

At about half-past three the rain turned into a cool, damp mist. A few thin drops still floated in it like dew. Gatsby looked through a copy of Clay’s *Economics* with empty eyes. He jumped at the heavy steps of the Finn, which shook the kitchen floor. From time to time he looked toward the misty windows. It was as if strange and frightening things were happening outside that nobody else could see. Finally he got up. In an uncertain voice he told me that he was going home.

“Why’s that?”

“Nobody’s coming to tea. It’s too late!” He looked at his watch, as if he had something important to do somewhere else. “I can’t wait all day.”

“Don’t be silly; it’s just two minutes to four.”

He sat down miserably, as if I had pushed him. At the same moment, we heard the sound of a car turning into my lane. We both jumped up. I was a little nervous myself, and I went out into the yard.

A large open car was coming up the drive under the wet, bare lilac-trees. It stopped. Daisy’s face looked out at me from under a three-cornered lavender hat. Her head was tipped to one side, and she had a bright, very happy smile.

“Is this absolutely where you live, my dearest one?”

The exciting music of her voice was like a wild medicine in the rain. For a moment I listened only to the sound of it, going up and down, before I heard any words. A wet line of hair lay across her cheek, like a stroke of blue paint. Her hand was wet with shining drops as I took it to help her out of the car.

“Are you in love with me,” she said quietly in my ear, “or why did I have to come alone?”

“That’s the secret of Castle Rackrent. Tell your chauffeur to go far away and spend an hour.”

“Come back in an hour, Ferdie.” Then, in a serious low voice: “His name is Ferdie.”

“Does the gasoline affect his nose?”

“I don’t think so,” she said innocently. “Why?”

We went in. To my great surprise, the living-room was empty.

“Well, that’s funny,” I said loudly.

“What’s funny?”

She turned her head, because there was a light, polite knock at the front door. I went out and opened it. Gatsby was standing in a puddle of water. He was as pale as death. His hands were pushed deep into his coat pockets, as heavy as weights. He was staring tragically into my eyes.

With his hands still in his coat pockets, he walked stiffly past me into the hall. He turned sharply, as if he were on a wire, and disappeared into the living-room. It wasn’t funny at all. I could hear my own heart beating loudly. I shut the door against the rain, which was getting heavier.

For half a minute there wasn’t a sound. Then from the living-room I heard a kind of choking murmur and part of a laugh. After that came Daisy’s voice, clear and false:

“I certainly am awfully glad to see you again.”

Then there was a pause. It went on for a horribly long time. I had nothing to do in the hall, so I went into the room.

Gatsby still had his hands in his pockets. He was leaning back against the mantelpiece. He was trying hard to look completely relaxed, even bored. His head leaned back so far that it touched the face of an old clock on the mantelpiece. The clock didn’t work any more. From there, his troubled eyes stared down at Daisy. She was sitting on the edge of a hard chair, frightened but graceful.

“We’ve met before,” said Gatsby in a low voice. His eyes looked at me for a moment. His lips opened, and he tried to laugh, but he couldn’t. Luckily, at that moment the clock tipped dangerously because of the pressure of his head. He turned and caught it with trembling fingers and put it back in its place. Then he sat down stiffly. He put his elbow on the arm of the sofa and his chin in his hand.

“I’m sorry about the clock,” he said.

My own face was now burning red, as if I were in the tropics. There were a thousand ordinary things to say in my head. But I couldn’t find a single one.

“It’s an old clock,” I told them stupidly.

I think we all believed for a moment that it had smashed into pieces on the floor.

“We haven’t met for many years,” said Daisy. Her voice was as calm and ordinary as it could ever be.

“Five years next November.”

Gatsby answered so automatically that we were all frozen for at least another minute. In desperation, I asked them to help me make tea in the kitchen. They were both on their feet when the Finn came in with the tea on a tray. She seemed like a little devil to me.

Among the cups and cakes there was a welcome confusion, and we began to behave more normally. Gatsby sat in a shadow. While Daisy and I talked, he looked carefully from one of us to the other, with tense, unhappy eyes. But being calm was not the point of the afternoon. So I made an excuse as soon as I could and stood up.

“Where are you going?” asked Gatsby, suddenly alarmed.

“I’ll be back.”

“I’ve got to speak to you about something before you go.”

He followed me wildly into the kitchen. He closed the door and whispered, “Oh, God!” in a miserable way.

“What’s the matter?”

“This is a terrible mistake,” he said, shaking his head from side to side. “A terrible, terrible mistake.”

“You’re just embarrassed, that’s all.” Then, luckily, I added, “Daisy’s embarrassed too.”

“She’s embarrassed?” he repeated. He couldn’t believe it.

“Just as much as you are.”

“Don’t talk so loud.”

“You’re acting like a little boy,” I said impatiently. “Not only that, but you’re rude. Daisy’s sitting in there all alone.”

He raised his hand to stop my words. He looked at me with a hurt, blaming look that I will never forget. Then he opened the door carefully and went back into the other room.

I went out the back way. Gatsby had done the same half an hour before, when he walked nervously round the house. I ran to a huge black tree with a twisted trunk. Its thick leaves made a roof against the rain. It was pouring again. Gatsby’s gardener had cut my uneven lawn very short. Now it was full of small muddy pools, like swamps from prehistoric times. There was nothing to look at from under the tree except Gatsby’s enormous house. So I stared at it for half an hour, the way the philosopher Kant stared at his church tower.

A brewer had built the house ten years before, at the beginning of the fashion for “period” houses in old styles. There was a story about him. He offered to pay five years’ taxes for all the cottages near him. In return, the owners had to cover their roofs with straw, like old country houses. They said no. Perhaps that took the heart out of his plan to Start a Great Family. His health went downhill at once. His children sold the house with the black wreath of mourning still on the door. Americans are willing, even eager, to be servants. But they have always refused to be peasants.

After half an hour the sun shone again. The grocer’s car drove round Gatsby’s drive with food for his servants’ dinner. I felt sure that Gatsby wouldn’t eat a spoonful. A maid began opening the upper windows of his house. She appeared for a moment in each one. Then she leaned out of the large window in the middle and spat thoughtfully into the garden. It was time for me to go back. While the rain was falling, it had sounded like the murmur of their voices. Now and then it had risen and grown louder, like waves of emotion. But in the new silence, I felt that silence had fallen inside the house too.

I went in. First I made every possible noise in the kitchen, except pushing over the stove. But I don’t believe they heard a sound. They were sitting at the two ends of the couch. They were looking at each other as if someone had asked a question. Or perhaps a question was still in the air. Every bit of embarrassment was gone. Daisy’s face was wet with tears. When I came in, she jumped up and began to wipe it with her handkerchief in front of a mirror. But Gatsby had changed in a way that amazed me. He was really glowing. He didn’t say a word or make any happy gesture. But a new happiness came out of him and filled the little room.

“Oh, hello, old sport,” he said, as if he hadn’t seen me for years. For a moment I thought he was going to shake hands.

“It’s stopped raining.”

“Has it?” Then he understood what I was talking about. There were little bells of sunshine twinkling in the room. He smiled like a weather man, like someone who is wildly happy that the light has come back again. He repeated the news to Daisy. “What do you think of that? It’s stopped raining.”

“I’m glad, Jay.” Her voice was full of an aching, sad beauty, but it spoke only of her unexpected joy.

“I want you and Daisy to come over to my house,” he said. “I’d like to show her around.”

“You’re sure you want me to come?”

“Absolutely, old sport.”

Daisy went upstairs to wash her face. Too late, I thought of my towels, and I felt ashamed. Gatsby and I waited on the lawn.

“My house looks well, doesn’t it?” he asked. “See how the whole front of it catches the light.”

I agreed that it was wonderful.

“Yes.” His eyes moved over it, over every arched door and square tower. “It took me just three years to earn the money that bought it.”

“I thought you inherited your money.”

“I did, old sport,” he said automatically, “but I lost most of it in the big panic—the panic of the war.”

I think he hardly knew what he was saying. When I asked him what business he was in, he answered, “That’s my affair.” Only then did he realise that it wasn’t a polite answer.

“Oh, I’ve been in several things,” he said, correcting 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 more carefully. “Do you mean you’ve been thinking about what I offered the other night?”

Before I could answer, Daisy came out of the house. Two rows of brass buttons on her dress shone 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. Famous people.”

We didn’t take the short way along the Sound. Instead we went down to the road and went in through the big back gate. Daisy made lovely little sounds of pleasure. She admired the shape of the castle-like house against the sky, and she admired the gardens. She loved the sparkling smell of the jonquils and the light, sweet smell of hawthorn and plum blossoms. She loved the pale gold smell of the kiss-me-at-the-gate flowers. It was strange to reach the marble steps and see no bright dresses moving in and out of the door. We heard no sound except the voices of birds in the trees.

Inside, we walked through music-rooms in the style of Marie Antoinette and salons in the style of the Restoration. I had the feeling that guests were hiding behind every couch and table. It was as if they had orders to stay silent, hardly breathing, until we had passed. As Gatsby closed the door of “the Merton College Library”, I could have sworn I heard Owl Eyes break into ghostly laughter.

We went upstairs. We passed through bedrooms in old styles, hung with rose and lavender silk and bright with fresh flowers. We passed dressing-rooms and poolrooms, and bathrooms with baths sunk into the floor. In one room we came upon an untidy man in pyjamas. He was doing exercises for his liver on the floor. It was Mr. Klipspringer, “the boarder”. I had seen him walking hungrily about the beach that morning. Finally we came to Gatsby’s own rooms: a bedroom, a bathroom and a study in the Adam style. There we sat down and drank a glass of Chartreuse, which he took from a cupboard in the wall.

He hadn’t stopped looking at Daisy even once. I think he gave a new value to everything in his house. The value depended on how her dear eyes reacted to it. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his things in a dazed way. It was as if none of it was real any more, now that she was really, amazingly, there. Once he nearly fell down a flight of stairs.

His bedroom was the simplest room of all. Only the dresser was special: on it there was a set of brushes and combs of pure, dull gold. Daisy took the brush with delight and smoothed her hair. Then Gatsby sat down, covered his eyes with his hand and began to laugh.

“It’s the funniest thing, old sport,” he said, laughing loudly. “I can’t—When I try to—”

You could see that he had passed through two stages, and now he was entering a third. First there was his embarrassment. Then there was his wild, unthinking joy. Now he was filled with wonder that she was really there. He had been full of this idea for so long. He had dreamed it right through to the end. He had waited with his teeth tight together, so to speak, with unbelievable intensity. Now that it had happened, he was slowing down, like a clock that has been wound too tightly.

After a minute he was himself again. He opened two huge, modern cupboards for us. They were full of his suits, dressing-gowns and ties. His shirts were piled in them like bricks, 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 in front of us, one by one. There were shirts of thin linen, thick silk and fine flannel. They lost their folds as they fell, and they covered the table in a colourful mess. While we admired them, he brought more, and the soft, rich pile grew higher. There were shirts with stripes and curling patterns and checks. They were coral and apple-green, lavender and pale orange, with letters sewn on them in indian blue. Suddenly Daisy made a strange, tight sound. She bent her head down into the shirts and began to cry wildly.

“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed. Her voice was muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.”

After the house, we were going to see the grounds, the swimming pool, the hydroplane and the midsummer flowers. But outside Gatsby’s window it began to rain again. So we stood in a row and looked at the rough, wavy 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.”

Suddenly Daisy put her arm through his. But he seemed lost in what he had just said. Perhaps he had just understood that the huge meaning of that light was now gone forever. For years, a great distance had separated him from Daisy. Compared to that distance, the light had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was just a green light on a dock again. There was one magic thing less in his world.

I began to walk about the room. I looked at different objects that I couldn’t see clearly in the half-darkness. A large photograph caught my attention. It hung on the wall over his desk. It showed an elderly man in yachting clothes.

“Who’s this?”

“That? That’s Mr. Dan Cody, old sport.”

The name sounded a little familiar.

“He’s dead now. He used to be my best friend years ago.”

There was a small picture of Gatsby on the chest of drawers. He was also in yachting clothes. His head was thrown back proudly, as if he wanted to fight the world. He was about eighteen in the picture.

“I adore it,” cried 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 newspaper cuttings—about you.”

They stood side by side and looked at them. I was going to ask to see the rubies, but then the phone rang, and Gatsby picked it up.

“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 put the phone down.

“Come here *quick*!” cried Daisy at the window.

The rain was still falling, but the dark sky had opened in the west. There was a great pink and golden wave of soft, foamy clouds above the sea.

“Look at that,” she whispered. 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 leave then, but they wouldn’t let me. Perhaps having me there made them feel even more pleasantly alone.

“I know what we’ll do,” said Gatsby. “We’ll have Klipspringer play the piano.”

He went out of the room calling “Ewing!” A few minutes later he came back with an embarrassed young man who looked a little tired. He had glasses with shell frames and thin blond hair. Now he was properly dressed, in a “sport shirt” open at the neck, sneakers and light cotton trousers of no clear colour.

“Did we interrupt your exercise?” Daisy asked politely.

“I was asleep,” cried Mr. Klipspringer, suddenly very embarrassed. “That is, I’d *been* asleep. Then I got up…”

“Klipspringer plays the piano,” said Gatsby, stopping him. “Don’t you, Ewing, old sport?”

“I don’t play well. I don’t—hardly play at all. I’m all out of prac—”

“We’ll go downstairs,” Gatsby interrupted. He pressed a switch. The grey windows disappeared as the whole house filled with light.

In the music-room Gatsby turned on a single lamp beside the piano. He lit Daisy’s cigarette with a trembling match. Then he sat down with her on a couch far across the room. There was no light there, only what the shining floor reflected from the hall.

Klipspringer played “The Love Nest”. Then he turned around on the bench and looked unhappily for Gatsby in the darkness.

“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,” ordered Gatsby. “Play!”

“In the morning, In the evening, Ain’t we got fun—”

Outside, the wind was loud, and there was quiet thunder along the Sound. All the lights were going on in West Egg now. The electric trains were rushing home through the rain from New York, full of men. It was the hour of a deep change in people’s lives, and there was excitement in 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—”

I went over to say goodbye. Then I saw that the confused look had come back into Gatsby’s face. It was as if he had a small doubt about how real his present happiness was. Almost five years! There must have been moments, even that afternoon, when Daisy was less than his dreams. It wasn’t her fault. It was because his dream was so huge and so alive. It had grown bigger than her, bigger than everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion. He had added to it all the time. He had decorated it with every bright feather that floated his way. No real fire or freshness can compete with what a man can keep in his ghostly heart.

As I watched him, I saw him change a little. His hand took hold of hers. She said something quietly in his ear, and he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most of all. It was warm and feverish, and it rose and fell. It couldn’t be dreamed bigger than it really was. That voice was a song that would never die.

They had forgotten me. But Daisy looked up and held out her hand. Gatsby didn’t know me at all now. I looked at them once more, and they looked back at me from far away, full of intense life. Then I went out of the room and down the marble steps into the rain, and I left them there together.

### Glossary

- **peninsula**: a piece of land with water on three sides
- **old sport**: Gatsby’s friendly, upper-class way of saying “my friend”
- **gonnegtion**: Wolfshiem’s way of saying “connection”; here, a partner for secret business
- **pantry**: a small room near the kitchen where food and dishes are kept
- **delicatessen**: a shop that sells ready-made food, cakes and meat
- **mantelpiece**: the shelf above a fireplace
- **brewer**: a man who owns a company that makes beer
- **peasant**: a poor farmer who works on the land, in old times
- **Chartreuse**: a strong green or yellow drink made with herbs
- **pompadour**: a hairstyle with the hair brushed up high over the forehead
- **yacht**: a large, expensive boat for pleasure
- **the boarder**: a person who pays to live and eat in someone else’s house; the guests’ name for Klipspringer

## VI

At about this time, an ambitious young reporter from New York came to Gatsby’s door one morning. He asked Gatsby if he had anything to say.

“Anything to say about what?” asked Gatsby politely.

“Why—any statement to give out.”

After five confused minutes, the truth came out. The man had heard Gatsby’s name at his office, in connection with something. He either wouldn’t say what it was or didn’t fully understand it. It was his day off, and he had hurried out “to see”. It showed admirable energy.

It was a shot in the dark, and yet the reporter’s instinct was right. Hundreds of people had accepted Gatsby’s hospitality. Because of this, they all thought they were experts on his past. They spread stories about him all summer. By now he was almost famous enough to be in the newspapers. Modern legends became attached to him, like the story of the “underground pipeline to Canada”. There was one story that people told again and again. They said he didn’t live in a house at all. They said he lived in a boat that looked like a house. It moved secretly up and down the Long Island shore. It isn’t easy to say why these stories pleased James Gatz of North Dakota.

James Gatz—that was really his name, or at least his legal name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen. He changed it at the exact moment when his career began. That was when he saw Dan Cody’s yacht drop anchor over the most dangerous shallow place on Lake Superior. It was James Gatz who had been walking lazily along the beach that afternoon. He was wearing a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas trousers. But it was already Jay Gatsby who borrowed a rowboat and rowed out to the *Tuolomee*. And it was Jay Gatsby who warned Cody about the danger. A wind might catch the yacht and break it up in half an hour.

I suppose he had had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents were lazy, unsuccessful farm people. In his imagination he had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, came from his own perfect idea of himself. He was a son of God. If that phrase means anything, it means just this. He had to do His Father’s work: to serve a huge, common and false kind of beauty. So he invented exactly the kind of Jay Gatsby that a boy of seventeen would invent. And he stayed faithful to this idea until the end.

For over a year he had worked his way along the south shore of Lake Superior. He dug for clams and fished for salmon. He did any other job that gave him food and a bed. His brown body grew hard, and it lived naturally through the work of those fresh, cold days. The work was half wild and half lazy. He knew women early. Because they spoiled him, he began to look down on them. He looked down on the young, innocent girls because they knew nothing. He looked down on the others because they got so emotional about things. He was so full of himself that he simply expected these things.

But his heart was always in a wild, stormy state. At night in bed, the strangest and most fantastic ideas filled his head. A whole world of indescribable, bright, showy things grew in his mind. Meanwhile the clock ticked on the washstand. The moon covered his messy clothes on the floor with its wet light. Every night he added more to the pattern of his dreams. He went on until sleep came down on some bright scene and took him away. For a while these dreams gave his imagination a way out. They were a pleasant sign that reality was not really real. They were a promise that the rock of the world stood safely on a fairy’s wing.

Some months before, a feeling about his future greatness had led him to a college. It was the small Lutheran College of St. Olaf’s, in southern Minnesota. He stayed there two weeks. He was shocked that the college didn’t care at all about his destiny. It didn’t care about the drums of his future, or about destiny itself. And he hated the cleaning job that he had to do to pay for his studies. Then he drifted back to Lake Superior. He was still looking for something to do on the day that Dan Cody’s yacht arrived. It dropped anchor in the shallow water near the shore.

Cody was fifty years old then. He had made his money in the Nevada silver fields and in the Yukon. He had been part of every rush for metal since seventy-five. Later, deals in Montana copper made him a millionaire many times over. By then his body was still strong, but his mind was getting soft. Countless women guessed this and tried to take his money from him. One of them was Ella Kaye, a newspaper woman. She controlled him the way Madame de Maintenon controlled a weak king. Her methods were not very nice. She sent him to sea in a yacht. In 1902 all the cheap newspapers wrote about it. For five years he had been sailing along shores where people were far too friendly. Then he turned up in Little Girl Bay and became James Gatz’s destiny.

Young Gatz rested on his oars and looked up at the deck with its railings. To him, that yacht stood for all the beauty and glamour in the world. I suppose he smiled at Cody. He had probably found out that people liked him when he smiled. Anyway, Cody asked him a few questions, and one of the answers was the brand-new name. Cody found that he was quick and very, very ambitious. A few days later Cody took him to Duluth. He bought him a blue coat, six pairs of white duck trousers and a yachting cap. And when the *Tuolomee* left for the West Indies and the Barbary Coast, Gatsby left too.

His job with Cody was a vague, personal one. While he stayed with Cody, he was a steward, a mate, a skipper and a secretary. He was even a jailer. Dan Cody sober knew what wild things Dan Cody drunk might soon do. To be ready for this, he trusted Gatsby more and more. The arrangement lasted five years. During that time the boat went three times around the Continent. It might have gone on forever. But one night in Boston, Ella Kaye came on board. A week later Dan Cody died, very rudely, like a bad host.

I remember the portrait of him up in Gatsby’s bedroom. He was a grey, red-faced man with a hard, empty face. He was a wild pioneer who lived for drink and pleasure. At one time in American history, men like him brought the violence of the frontier back to the East. They brought the wild life of its bars and houses of prostitution with them. Gatsby drank very little, and this was, in an indirect way, because of Cody. Sometimes, at cheerful parties, women used to rub champagne into his hair. Gatsby himself got into the habit of leaving alcohol 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 trick that was used against him. But all that was left of the millions went to Ella Kaye. Gatsby was left only with his education, which suited him very well. The vague outline of Jay Gatsby had filled out, and he had become a real, solid man.

He told me all this much later. But I have written it down here to destroy those first wild rumours about his family and his past. They weren’t even slightly true. Also, he told it to me at a confusing time. By then I believed everything and nothing about him. So I am using this short pause to clear away these wrong ideas. It is a pause while Gatsby, so to speak, caught his breath.

It was a pause, too, in my part in his life. For several weeks I didn’t see him or hear his voice on the phone. I was mostly in New York, going around with Jordan. I was also trying to make her very old aunt like me. But finally, one Sunday afternoon, I went over to his house. I had been there less than two minutes when somebody brought Tom Buchanan in for a drink. Of course I was surprised. But the really surprising thing was that it hadn’t happened before.

They were a group of three on horseback. There was Tom, a man named Sloane, and a pretty woman in a brown riding-habit. She had been there before.

“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 quickly around the room, ringing bells for the servants. “I’ll have something to drink for you in just a minute.”

The fact that Tom was there affected him deeply. But he would be uneasy anyway until he had given them something. In a vague way he understood that this was the only reason they had come. 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.”

Gatsby couldn’t stop himself. He turned to Tom, who had accepted the introduction as if they were strangers.

“I believe we’ve met somewhere before, Mr. Buchanan.”

“Oh, yes,” said Tom. He was polite in a rough way, but he clearly didn’t remember. “So we did. I remember very well.”

“About two weeks ago.”

“That’s right. You were with Nick here.”

“I know your wife,” Gatsby went on, almost aggressively.

“That so?”

Tom turned to me.

“You live near here, Nick?”

“Next door.”

“That so?”

Mr. Sloane didn’t join in the conversation. He leaned back proudly in his chair. The woman said nothing either. Then, after two highballs, she suddenly became friendly.

“We’ll all come over to your next party, Mr. Gatsby,” she said. “What do you say?”

“Certainly; I’d be delighted to have you.”

“Be ver’ nice,” said Mr. Sloane, without any thanks in his voice. “Well—think ought to be starting home.”

“Please don’t hurry,” Gatsby begged 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 eagerly. “Both of you.”

She meant me too. Mr. Sloane got to his feet.

“Come along,” he said—but only to her.

“I mean it,” she said again. “I’d love to have you. Lots of room.”

Gatsby looked at me with a question in his eyes. He wanted to go. He didn’t see that Mr. Sloane had decided that he shouldn’t.

“I’m afraid I won’t be able to,” I said.

“Well, you come,” she urged, looking only at Gatsby.

Mr. Sloane said something quietly into her ear.

“We won’t be late if we start now,” she said loudly.

“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 onto the porch. There Sloane and the lady went to one side and began a passionate conversation.

“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 got on 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 gave each other a cool nod. Then they rode quickly down the drive and disappeared under the August leaves. Just at that moment Gatsby came out of the front door, with his hat and a light overcoat in his hand.

Tom was clearly worried about Daisy going around alone. So on the following Saturday night he came with her to Gatsby’s party. Perhaps it was because he was there, but the evening felt strangely heavy and unpleasant. In my memory it is different from all Gatsby’s other parties that summer. There were the same people, or at least the same kind of people. There was the same flood of champagne. There was the same noise, in many colours and many tones. But I felt something unpleasant in the air, a harshness everywhere that hadn’t been there before.

Or perhaps I had simply got used to it. I had come to accept West Egg as a complete world of its own. It had its own rules and its own great people. It was second to nothing, because it never thought about being second. And now I was looking at it again, through Daisy’s eyes. It is always sad to look with new eyes at things that you have worked hard to get used to.

They arrived at twilight. We walked out among the hundreds of sparkling guests. Daisy’s voice was playing soft, murmuring 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 show a green card. I’m giving out green—”

“Look around,” said Gatsby.

“I’m looking around. I’m having a marvellous—”

“You must see the faces of many people you’ve heard about.”

Tom’s proud eyes moved over 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 pointed to a gorgeous woman who was sitting like a queen under a white-plum tree. She was like an orchid, so beautiful that she hardly seemed human. Tom and Daisy stared at her. They had that strange, unreal feeling you have when you see a movie star in real life. Until then, she had only been a shadow on a screen.

“She’s lovely,” said Daisy.

“The man bending over her is her director.”

He took them very formally from group to group.

“Mrs. Buchanan… and Mr. Buchanan—” He hesitated for a moment. Then he added: “the polo player.”

“Oh no,” said Tom quickly, “not me.”

But clearly Gatsby liked the sound of it. Tom stayed “the polo player” for the rest of the evening.

“I’ve never met so many celebrities,” cried Daisy. “I liked that man—what was his name?—with the sort of blue nose.”

Gatsby told her his name. He added 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 that his graceful, old-fashioned foxtrot surprised me. I had never seen him dance before. Then they walked slowly over to my house and sat on the steps for half an hour. At her request, I stayed in the garden and kept watch.

“In case there’s a fire or a flood,” she explained, “or any act of God.”

Tom came out of 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 telling some funny stories.”

“Go ahead,” answered Daisy cheerfully, “and if you want to take down any addresses, here’s my little gold pencil.”…

After a moment she looked around. She told me that the girl was “common but pretty”. I knew that she wasn’t having a good time, except for the half-hour when she had been alone with Gatsby.

We were at a table where everyone was rather drunk. That was my fault. Gatsby had been called to the phone. And only two weeks before, I had enjoyed these same people. But the things that amused me then now seemed to poison the air.

“How do you feel, Miss Baedeker?”

The girl was trying to slump against my shoulder, but she kept failing. When I asked my question, she sat up and opened her eyes.

“Wha’?”

A large, slow, heavy woman spoke up to defend Miss Baedeker. She had been asking Daisy to play golf with her at the local club the next day.

“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,” said Miss Baedeker in an empty voice.

“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 any real thanks. “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,” said Miss Baedeker unclearly. “They almost drowned me once over in New Jersey.”

“Then you ought to leave it alone,” answered 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 is standing with Daisy and watching the movie director and his Star. They were still under the white-plum tree. Their faces were touching, except for a thin, pale ray of moonlight between them. I realised that he had been bending toward her very slowly all evening to get this close. Even while I watched, I saw him bend down one last little bit and kiss her cheek.

“I like her,” said Daisy. “I think she’s lovely.”

But the rest offended her. There is no doubt about the reason: it wasn’t just a pose, it was a real emotion. West Egg shocked her. It was a new kind of “place”, born when Broadway came to a Long Island fishing village. Its rough energy shocked her. It didn’t fit inside the old polite ways of talking. She was shocked, too, by the fate that drove its people along a shortcut from nothing to nothing. That fate was far too easy to see. She saw something awful in its simplicity, which she couldn’t 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 threw ten square feet of light out into the soft black morning. Sometimes a shadow moved against a blind in a dressing-room upstairs. Then another shadow took its place, and then another, in an endless line. They were women putting on make-up and powder in front of a mirror that we couldn’t see.

“Who is this Gatsby anyhow?” asked Tom suddenly. “Some big bootlegger?”

“Where did you hear that?” I asked.

“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 little stones of the drive crunched under his feet.

“Well, he certainly must have worked hard to get this zoo together.”

A breeze moved the grey, soft hairs of Daisy’s fur collar.

“At least they are 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 soft, rough, rhythmic whisper. She gave each word a meaning that it had never had before and would never have again. When the tune went up, her voice broke sweetly as it followed. Low women’s voices do that. Each change poured out a little of her warm human magic into 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 say no.”

“I’d like to know who he is and what he does,” said Tom firmly. “And I think I’ll make a point of finding out.”

“I can tell you right now,” she answered. “He owned some drugstores, a lot of drugstores. He built them up himself.”

The limousine, which was late, came slowly up the drive.

“Good night, Nick,” said Daisy.

Her eyes left me and looked up to the lighted top of the steps. A neat, sad little waltz of that year, “Three O’Clock in the Morning”, was floating out of the open door. After all, Gatsby’s party was so casual that romantic things could happen there. These things were completely missing from her own world. What was it up there in the song that seemed to call her back inside? What would happen now, in the dark hours that nobody could predict? Perhaps some unbelievable guest would arrive. She would be someone very rare and wonderful, a truly shining young girl. With one fresh look at Gatsby, in one magic moment, she would wipe out his five years of faithful love for Daisy.

I stayed late that night. Gatsby asked me to wait until he was free. So I stayed in the garden until the usual swimming party came running up from the black beach. They were cold and excited. I waited until the lights went out in the guestrooms upstairs. When he finally came down the steps, the brown skin of his face was unusually tight. His eyes were bright and tired.

“She didn’t like it,” he said immediately.

“Of course she did.”

“She didn’t like it,” he said again. “She didn’t have a good time.”

He was silent, and I guessed that he was terribly unhappy, more than he could say.

“I feel far away from her,” he said. “It’s hard to make her understand.”

“You mean about the dance?”

“The dance?” With a snap of his fingers, he waved away all the dances he had ever given. “Old sport, the dance is unimportant.”

He wanted nothing less from Daisy than this: she should go to Tom and say, “I never loved you.” With that sentence she would wipe out four years. After that, they could decide on the more practical steps. One of them was this: after she was free, they would go back to Louisville. They would 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 stopped. He began to walk up and down a sad, empty path covered with fruit peel, thrown-away party gifts and crushed flowers.

“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I said carefully. “You can’t repeat the past.”

“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried. He couldn’t believe what I had said. “Why of course you can!”

He looked around him wildly. It was as if the past were hiding 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 firmly. “She’ll see.”

He talked a lot about the past. I understood that he wanted to get something back. Perhaps it was some idea of himself that had gone into loving Daisy. Since then his life had been confused and disordered. But perhaps he could go back to a certain starting point and go over it all slowly. Then he could find out what that thing was…

… One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street. The leaves were falling. They came to a place where there were no trees, and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped there and turned toward each other. It was a cool night. It had that mysterious excitement that comes at the two changes of the year, in spring and in autumn. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness. There was movement and life among the stars. From the corner of his eye, Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder. It went up to a secret place above the trees. He could climb to it, if he climbed alone. Once he was there, he could drink life itself, like a baby drinking milk. He could swallow the wonderful milk of wonder, which nothing could equal.

His heart beat faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew what would happen when he kissed this girl. His great dreams, too big for words, would be joined forever to her human breath, which would one day die. After that his mind would never again play freely, like the mind of God. So he waited. For a moment longer he listened to the pure note of a tuning-fork that had been struck on a star. Then he kissed her. When his lips touched hers, she opened for him like a flower. His dream had become a real, living person.

Through all he said, even through his terrible sentimentality, I was reminded of something. It was a rhythm that I couldn’t quite catch, a piece of lost words. I had heard it somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to form in my mouth. My lips opened like a man who cannot speak. It was as if something more than a breath of surprised air was struggling on them. But they made no sound. And what I had almost remembered could never be told to anyone.

### Glossary

- **legend**: an old or popular story that many people tell, which is often not true
- **yacht**: a large, expensive boat for pleasure
- **drop anchor**: to let down a heavy metal object that holds a ship in one place
- **steward / mate / skipper**: jobs on a ship: a servant, an officer, and the captain
- **legacy**: money left to someone by a person who has died
- **riding-habit**: special clothes that a woman wears for riding a horse
- **highball**: a mixed alcoholic drink with ice
- **in oblivion**: where nobody notices or remembers you
- **foxtrot / waltz**: kinds of dances
- **bootlegger**: a person who makes or sells alcohol illegally
- **tuning-fork**: a small metal tool that makes one clear, pure musical note

## VII

People were more curious about Gatsby than ever before. Then, one Saturday night, the lights in his house did not go on. His time as Trimalchio, the host of huge parties, was over. It ended as mysteriously as it had begun. Only slowly did I notice something. Cars turned hopefully into his drive. They stayed for just a minute, and then they drove sulkily away. I wondered if he was sick, so I went over to find out. An unfamiliar butler with a wicked face opened the door. He narrowed his eyes and looked at me suspiciously.

“Is Mr. Gatsby sick?”

“Nope.” After a pause he added “sir” in a slow, unwilling way.

“I hadn’t seen him around, and I was rather worried. Tell him Mr. Carraway came over.”

“Who?” he asked rudely.

“Carraway.”

“Carraway. All right, I’ll tell him.”

Suddenly he slammed the door.

My Finn told me the news. A week ago Gatsby had sent away every servant in his house. He had replaced them with half a dozen new ones. These people never went into West Egg village, where shopkeepers might bribe them. Instead they ordered small amounts of food over the telephone. The grocery boy said that the kitchen looked like a pigsty. Most people in the village thought that the new people weren’t servants at all.

The next day Gatsby phoned me.

“Going away?” I asked.

“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 house, full of strangers like a big inn, had fallen down like a house of cards. One look of disapproval in her eyes had been enough.

“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 phoning because Daisy had asked him to. Would I come to lunch at her house tomorrow? Miss Baker would be there. Half an hour later Daisy herself phoned. She seemed relieved that I was coming. Something was going on. And yet I couldn’t believe that they would choose this occasion for a scene. I especially couldn’t believe it of the painful scene that Gatsby had described to me in the garden.

The next day was burning hot. It was almost the last day of the summer, and certainly the hottest. My train came out of the tunnel into the sunlight. Everything was silent in the heat of noon. Only the hot whistles of the National Biscuit Company broke the silence. The straw seats of the train were so hot that they nearly caught fire. The woman next to me sweated gently into her white blouse for a while. Then her newspaper grew damp under her fingers. She gave a sad, hopeless cry and sank into the deep heat. Her handbag fell to the floor with a slap.

“Oh, my!” she said, out of breath.

I bent down tiredly and picked it up. I handed it back to her at arm’s length. I held it only by the very tips of the corners. I wanted to show that I had no plans to steal it. But everyone near me suspected me just the same, and so did the woman.

“Hot!” the conductor said to the people he knew. “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 mark from his hand. In this heat, how could anyone care whose red lips he kissed? How could anyone care whose head made his pyjama pocket damp, over his heart!

… A faint wind blew through the hall of the Buchanans’ house. It carried the sound of the telephone bell out to Gatsby and me. We were waiting at the door.

“The master’s body?” the butler shouted into the phone. “I’m sorry, madame, but we can’t give it to you—it’s far too hot to touch this noon!”

What he really said was: “Yes… Yes… I’ll see.”

He put down the receiver and came toward us. His face was shining a little with sweat. He took our stiff straw hats.

“Madame expects you in the salon!” he cried. He pointed the way, though we did not need it. In this heat every extra movement seemed like an insult to the little life that all of us had left.

The room was dark and cool, because awnings shaded the windows well. Daisy and Jordan lay on an enormous couch, like silver idols. They seemed to hold their own white dresses down against the singing wind of the fans.

“We can’t move,” they said together.

Jordan’s fingers were tanned, with white powder over the tan. They rested for a moment in mine.

“And Mr. Thomas Buchanan, the athlete?” I asked.

At the same moment I heard his voice at the hall telephone. It was rough, low and husky.

Gatsby stood in the centre of the dark red carpet. He looked around with fascinated eyes. Daisy watched him and laughed her sweet, exciting laugh. A tiny cloud of powder rose from her chest into the air.

“The rumour is,” whispered Jordan, “that that’s Tom’s girl on the telephone.”

We were silent. The voice in the hall rose high and angry: “Very well, then, I won’t sell you the car at all… I don’t owe you anything at all… And as for bothering me about it at lunch time—I won’t stand that at all!”

“He’s holding down the receiver,” said Daisy cynically.

“No, he’s not,” I told her. “It’s a real business deal. I happen to know about it.”

Tom threw open the door. For a moment his thick body filled the whole doorway. Then he hurried into the room.

“Mr. Gatsby!” He held out his broad, flat hand. He hid his dislike well. “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. She pulled his face down and kissed him on the mouth.

“You know I love you,” she said softly.

“You forget there’s a lady present,” said Jordan.

Daisy looked around, unsure.

“You kiss Nick too.”

“What a low, vulgar girl!”

“I don’t care!” cried Daisy. She began to dance on the brick fireplace, stamping her feet noisily. Then she remembered the heat and sat down guiltily on the couch. Just then a nurse in a freshly washed uniform came into the room. She was leading a little girl.

“Bles-sed pre-cious,” Daisy sang softly, holding out her arms. “Come to your own mother that loves you.”

The nurse let the child go. The little girl rushed across the room and pushed her face 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, one after the other, bent down and took the small, unwilling hand. Afterwards he kept looking at the child in surprise. I don’t think he had ever really believed before that she existed.

“I got dressed before luncheon,” said the child. She turned eagerly to Daisy.

“That’s because your mother wanted to show you off.” Daisy bent her face into the one small fold of the child’s white neck. “You dream, you. You absolute little dream.”

“Yes,” the child agreed 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,” Daisy explained. “She looks like me. She’s got my hair and shape of the face.”

Daisy sat back on the couch. The nurse took a step forward and held out her hand.

“Come, Pammy.”

“Goodbye, sweetheart!”

The well-behaved child held her nurse’s hand and looked back unwillingly. She was pulled out of the door. At that moment Tom came back. Four gin rickeys came in ahead of him, clicking with ice.

Gatsby took his drink.

“They certainly look cool,” he said. He was clearly tense.

We drank in long, greedy mouthfuls.

“I read somewhere that the sun’s getting hotter every year,” said Tom in a friendly way. “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 said to Gatsby. “I’d like you to have a look at the place.”

I went with them out to the veranda. The green Sound lay still in the heat. One small sail moved slowly toward the fresher, open sea. For a moment Gatsby’s eyes followed it. Then he raised his hand and pointed across the bay.

“I’m right across from you.”

“So you are.”

We looked out over the rose-beds and the hot lawn. We looked at the weeds and rubbish that the hot summer days had left along the shore. Slowly the white wings of the boat moved against the cool blue edge of the sky. Ahead lay the ocean with its curving waves, and the rich and blessed islands.

“There’s sport for you,” said Tom, nodding. “I’d like to be out there with him for about an hour.”

We had lunch in the dining-room, which was also darkened against the heat. With the cold ale we drank down a nervous kind of cheerfulness.

“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 the air gets cool and fresh in the fall.”

“But it’s so hot,” Daisy insisted. She was almost crying. “And everything’s so confused. Let’s all go to town!”

Her voice fought on through the heat. It beat against the heat and tried to give its senselessness some kind of shape.

“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?” Daisy asked again, firmly. Gatsby’s eyes moved slowly toward her. “Ah,” she cried, “you look so cool.”

Their eyes met. They stared at each other, as if they were alone in space. With an effort she looked down at the table.

“You always look so cool,” she repeated.

She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw it. He was amazed. His mouth opened a little. He looked at Gatsby, and then back at Daisy. It was as if he had just recognized her as someone he had known a long time ago.

“You look like the advertisement of the man,” she went on innocently. “You know the advertisement of the man—”

“All right,” Tom broke in quickly. “I’m perfectly willing to go to town. Come on—we’re all going to town.”

He stood up. His eyes were still flashing between Gatsby and his wife. No one moved.

“Come on!” He was starting to lose his temper. “What’s the matter, anyhow? If we’re going to town, let’s start.”

His hand shook with his effort to control himself. He lifted the last of his glass of ale to his lips. Daisy’s voice got us to our feet. It got us out on to the burning hot gravel drive.

“Are we just going to go?” she protested. “Like this? Aren’t we going to let anyone smoke a cigarette first?”

“Everybody smoked all through lunch.”

“Oh, let’s have fun,” she begged him. “It’s too hot to fuss.”

He didn’t answer.

“Have it your own way,” she said. “Come on, Jordan.”

They went upstairs to get ready. We three men stood there, moving the hot little stones around with our feet. A thin silver curve of moon was already hanging in the western sky. Gatsby started to speak, then changed his mind. But Tom had already turned round quickly. He faced Gatsby and waited.

“Have you got your stables here?” Gatsby asked 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,” Tom burst out savagely. “Women get these ideas in their heads—”

“Shall we take anything to drink?” Daisy called from an upper window.

“I’ll get some whisky,” Tom answered. He went inside.

Gatsby turned to me stiffly.

“I can’t say anything in his house, old sport.”

“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I said. “It’s full of—” I stopped.

“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.

That was it. I had never understood it before. It was full of money. That was the endless charm that rose and fell in it. It was the jingle of coins in it, the song of cymbals in it… High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl…

Tom came out of the house. He was wrapping a quart bottle in a towel. Daisy and Jordan followed him. They wore small, tight hats of shiny metal cloth. They carried light capes over their arms.

“Shall we all go in my car?” Gatsby suggested. He felt the hot, green leather of the seat. “I ought to have left it in the shade.”

“Is it standard shift?” Tom asked sharply.

“Yes.”

“Well, you take my coupé and let me drive your car to town.”

Gatsby did not like this idea.

“I don’t think there’s much gas,” he objected.

“Plenty of gas,” Tom said loudly. He looked at the gauge. “And if it runs out I can stop at a drugstore. You can buy anything at a drugstore nowadays.”

There was a pause after this remark. It seemed to have no point. Daisy looked at Tom and frowned. A strange expression passed over Gatsby’s face. It was hard to describe. It was definitely unfamiliar to me. And yet I vaguely recognized it, as if I had only heard it described in words.

“Come on, Daisy,” said Tom. He pressed her with his hand toward Gatsby’s car. “I’ll take you in this circus wagon.”

He opened the door, but she moved out of the circle of his arm.

“You take Nick and Jordan. We’ll follow you in the coupé.”

She walked close to Gatsby, touching his coat with her hand. Jordan and Tom and I got into the front seat of Gatsby’s car. Tom tried the unfamiliar gears carefully. Then we shot off into the heavy heat. Soon the other two were out of sight behind us.

“Did you see that?” Tom demanded.

“See what?”

He looked at me sharply. He realized that Jordan and I must have known all along.

“You think I’m pretty dumb, don’t you?” he said. “Perhaps I am, but I have a—almost a second sight, sometimes, that tells me what to do. Maybe you don’t believe that, but science—”

He stopped. The real problem in front of him pulled him back. He did not fall into the deep hole of his theories.

“I’ve made a small investigation of this fellow,” he went on. “I could have gone deeper if I’d known—”

“Do you mean you’ve been to a medium?” Jordan asked, joking.

“What?” He stared at us in confusion as we laughed. “A medium?”

“About Gatsby.”

“About Gatsby! No, I haven’t. I said I’d been making a small investigation of his past.”

“And you found he was an Oxford man,” said Jordan helpfully.

“An Oxford man!” He could not believe it. “Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit.”

“All the same, he’s an Oxford man.”

“Oxford, New Mexico,” Tom snorted with contempt, “or something like that.”

“Listen, Tom. If you’re such a snob, why did you invite him to lunch?” Jordan asked crossly.

“Daisy invited him. She knew him before we were married—God knows where!”

We were all bad-tempered now, because the effect of the ale was fading. We knew it, so we drove for a while in silence. Then the faded eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg came into sight down the road. I remembered Gatsby’s warning about the gasoline.

“We’ve got enough to get us to town,” said Tom.

“But there’s a garage right here,” Jordan objected. “I don’t want to get stuck in this baking heat.”

Tom impatiently put on both brakes. We slid to a sudden, dusty stop under Wilson’s sign. After a moment the owner came out of his garage. He stared at the car with hollow eyes.

“Let’s have some gas!” Tom cried roughly. “What do you think we stopped for—to admire the view?”

“I’m sick,” said Wilson without moving. “Been sick all day.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m all run down.”

“Well, shall I help myself?” Tom demanded. “You sounded well enough on the phone.”

With an effort Wilson left the shade and support of the doorway. Breathing hard, he unscrewed the cap of the tank. In the sunlight his face was green.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt your lunch,” he said. “But I need money pretty bad. And I was wondering what you were going to do with your old car.”

“How do you like this one?” Tom asked. “I bought it last week.”

“It’s a nice yellow one,” said Wilson. He was pulling hard at the handle of the pump.

“Like to buy it?”

“Big chance,” Wilson said with a weak smile. “No, but I could make some money on the other.”

“What do you want money for, all of a sudden?”

“I’ve been here too long. I want to get away. My wife and I want to go West.”

“Your wife does,” Tom exclaimed. He was surprised.

“She’s been talking about it for ten years.” He rested for a moment against the pump and shaded his eyes. “And now she’s going whether she wants to or not. I’m going to get her away.”

The coupé flashed past us in a cloud of dust. A hand waved quickly from it.

“What do I owe you?” Tom asked harshly.

“I just found out about something funny in the last two days,” said Wilson. “That’s why I want to get away. That’s why I been bothering you about the car.”

“What do I owe you?”

“Dollar twenty.”

The hard, beating heat was beginning to confuse me. I had a bad, frightened moment. Then I realized that, so far, Wilson did not suspect Tom. He had discovered that Myrtle had some kind of life without him, in another world. The shock had made him physically sick. I stared at him and then at Tom. Tom had made the same kind of discovery less than an hour before. And I thought about the difference between the sick and the well. No other difference between men was so deep. It was deeper than any difference of intelligence or race. Wilson was so sick that he looked guilty, terribly guilty. He looked as if he had just made some poor girl pregnant.

“I’ll let you have that car,” said Tom. “I’ll send it over tomorrow afternoon.”

That place always made me a little uneasy, even in the bright light of the afternoon. Now I turned my head, as if someone had warned me about something behind me. Over the ash-heaps the giant eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg kept watch. But after a moment I noticed other eyes. They were watching us very closely from less than twenty feet away.

In one of the windows over the garage, the curtains had been moved aside a little. Myrtle Wilson was looking down at the car. She was so absorbed that she did not know anyone could see her. One feeling after another came slowly into her face. It was like objects slowly appearing in a photograph as it develops. Her expression was strangely familiar to me. I had often seen it on women’s faces. But on Myrtle Wilson’s face it seemed to have no purpose or reason. Then I understood. Her eyes were wide with jealous terror. They were fixed not on Tom, but on Jordan Baker. Myrtle thought that Jordan was his wife.

There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind. As we drove away, Tom felt panic hitting him like hot whips. Until an hour ago his wife and his mistress had been safe and completely his. Now both of them were quickly slipping out of his control. Instinct made him press down hard on the accelerator. He had two aims. He wanted to catch up with Daisy, and he wanted to leave Wilson behind. We raced toward Astoria at fifty miles an hour. Then we came among the thin, spidery iron beams of the elevated railway. There, at last, we saw the blue coupé ahead, moving along calmly.

“Those big movies around Fiftieth Street are cool,” Jordan suggested. “I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone’s away. There’s something very sensuous about it. It’s overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.”

The word “sensuous” made Tom even more uneasy. But before he could think of a protest, the coupé stopped. Daisy signalled to us to pull up beside her.

“Where are we going?” she cried.

“How about the movies?”

“It’s so hot,” she complained. “You go. We’ll ride around and meet you after.” With an effort she found a little of her humour. “We’ll meet you on some corner. I’ll be the man smoking two cigarettes.”

“We can’t argue about it here,” Tom said impatiently. A truck behind us gave an angry whistle. “You follow me to the south side of Central Park, in front of the Plaza.”

Several times he turned his head and looked back for their car. If the traffic held them up, he slowed down until they came into sight. I think he was afraid they would rush down a side-street and out of his life forever.

But they didn’t. And then we all took a step that is harder to explain. We hired the parlour of a suite in the Plaza Hotel.

There was a long, noisy argument that ended by pushing us all into that room. I cannot remember it now. But I have a sharp physical memory of it. During the argument my underwear kept climbing up around my legs like a damp snake. Every now and then, drops of sweat ran cool across my back. The idea began with Daisy. She suggested that we hire five bathrooms and take cold baths. Then it took a more real form as “a place to have a mint julep.” Each of us said over and over that it was a “crazy idea.” We all talked at once to a puzzled clerk. We thought, or pretended to think, that we were being very funny…

The room was large, and so hot that we could hardly breathe. It was already four o’clock. But when we opened the windows, only a gust of hot air came in from the bushes in the Park. Daisy went to the mirror and stood with her back to us, fixing her hair.

“It’s a swell suite,” whispered Jordan respectfully, and everyone laughed.

“Open another window,” Daisy ordered, without turning around.

“There aren’t any more.”

“Well, we’d better telephone for an axe—”

“The thing to do is to forget about the heat,” Tom said impatiently. “You make it ten times worse by complaining about it.”

He unwrapped the bottle of whisky from the towel and put it on the table.

“Why not let her alone, old sport?” said Gatsby. “You’re the one that wanted to come to town.”

There was a moment of silence. The telephone book slipped off its nail and fell on the floor with a splash. Jordan whispered, “Excuse me”—but this time nobody laughed.

“I’ll pick it up,” I offered.

“I’ve got it.” Gatsby looked at the broken string. He said “Hum!” in an interested way and threw the book on a chair.

“That’s a great expression of yours, isn’t it?” Tom said sharply.

“What is?”

“All this ‘old sport’ business. Where’d you pick that up?”

“Now see here, Tom,” said Daisy. She turned around from the mirror. “If you’re going to make personal remarks, I won’t stay here a minute. Call up and order some ice for the mint julep.”

As Tom picked up the receiver, the trapped heat seemed to explode into sound. We were listening to the heavy, serious music of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March. It came from the ballroom below.

“Imagine marrying anybody in this heat!” cried Jordan miserably.

“Still—I was married in the middle of June,” Daisy remembered. “Louisville in June! Somebody fainted. Who was it fainted, Tom?”

“Biloxi,” he answered shortly.

“A man named Biloxi. ‘Blocks’ Biloxi, and he made boxes—that’s a fact—and he was from Biloxi, Tennessee.”

“They carried him into my house,” Jordan added, “because we lived just two doors from the church. And he stayed three weeks, until Daddy told him he had to get out. The day after he left, Daddy died.” After a moment she added something more. She was afraid she had sounded disrespectful. “There wasn’t any connection.”

“I used to know a Bill Biloxi from Memphis,” I said.

“That was his cousin. I knew his whole family history before he left. He gave me an aluminium putter that I use today.”

The music had stopped when the ceremony began. Now a long cheer floated in at the window. Then came cries of “Yea—ea—ea!” every now and then. Finally there was a burst of jazz as the dancing began.

“We’re getting old,” said Daisy. “If we were young we’d rise and dance.”

“Remember Biloxi,” Jordan warned her. “Where’d you know him, Tom?”

“Biloxi?” He tried hard to think. “I didn’t know him. He was a friend of Daisy’s.”

“He was not,” she said. “I’d never seen him before. He came down in the private car.”

“Well, he said he knew you. He said he was raised in Louisville. Asa Bird brought him around at the last minute. He asked if we had room for him.”

Jordan smiled.

“He was probably getting a free ride home. He told me he was president of your class at Yale.”

Tom and I looked at each other blankly.

“Bil*oxi*?”

“In the first place, we didn’t have any president—”

Gatsby’s foot beat a short, restless rhythm on the floor. Suddenly Tom looked at him.

“By the way, Mr. Gatsby, I understand you’re an Oxford man.”

“Not exactly.”

“Oh, yes, I understand you went to Oxford.”

“Yes—I went there.”

A pause. Then came Tom’s voice. It was full of disbelief, and it was insulting.

“You must have gone there about the time Biloxi went to New Haven.”

Another pause. A waiter knocked and came in with crushed mint and ice. He said “thank you” and closed the door softly. But the silence did not break. This huge question was going to be answered at last.

“I told you I went there,” said Gatsby.

“I heard you, but I’d like to know when.”

“It was in nineteen-nineteen, I only stayed five months. That’s why I can’t really call myself an Oxford man.”

Tom glanced around to see if we shared his disbelief. But we were all looking at Gatsby.

“It was an opportunity they gave to some of the officers after the armistice,” he went on. “We could go to any of the universities in England or France.”

I wanted to get up and slap him on the back. Once again, as before, I suddenly felt complete faith in him.

Daisy stood up, smiling faintly, and went to the table.

“Open the whisky, Tom,” she ordered, “and I’ll make you a mint julep. Then you won’t seem so stupid to yourself… Look at the mint!”

“Wait a minute,” Tom said sharply. “I want to ask Mr. Gatsby one more question.”

“Go on,” Gatsby said politely.

“What kind of a row are you trying to cause in my house anyhow?”

Now it was all out in the open at last, and Gatsby was satisfied.

“He isn’t causing a row.” Daisy looked desperately from one to the other. “You’re causing a row. Please have a little self-control.”

“Self-control!” Tom repeated. He could not believe it. “I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if that’s the idea you can count me out… Nowadays people begin by laughing at family life and family traditions. And next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white.”

Tom’s face was red from his own passionate nonsense. He saw himself standing alone on the last wall that protected civilization.

“We’re all white here,” Jordan said quietly.

“I know I’m not very popular. I don’t give big parties. I suppose you’ve got to make your house into a pigsty in order to have any friends—in the modern world.”

I was angry, and so were we all. But I wanted to laugh whenever he opened his mouth. He had changed so completely. He was a man who chased women. But now he was a man who preached about good behaviour.

“I’ve got something to tell *you*, old sport—” Gatsby began. But Daisy guessed what he was going to do.

“Please don’t!” she interrupted helplessly. “Please let’s all go home. Why don’t we all go home?”

“That’s a good idea.” I got up. “Come on, Tom. Nobody wants a drink.”

“I want to know what Mr. Gatsby has to tell me.”

“Your wife doesn’t love you,” said Gatsby. “She’s never loved you. She loves me.”

“You must be crazy!” Tom said automatically.

Gatsby jumped to his feet. He was bright with excitement.

“She never loved you, do you hear?” he cried. “She only married you because I was poor and she was tired of waiting for me. It was a terrible mistake, but in her heart she never loved anyone except me!”

At this point Jordan and I tried to go. But Tom and Gatsby both insisted that we stay. Each of them was trying to be firmer than the other. It was as if neither of them had anything to hide. It was as if it would be a privilege for us to share their feelings.

“Sit down, Daisy.” Tom tried to sound like a father, but he failed. “What’s been going on? I want to hear all about it.”

“I told you what’s been going on,” said Gatsby. “Going on for five years—and you didn’t know.”

Tom turned to Daisy sharply.

“You’ve been seeing this fellow for five years?”

“Not seeing,” said Gatsby. “No, we couldn’t meet. But both of us loved each other all that time, old sport, and you didn’t know. I used to laugh sometimes”—but there was no laughter in his eyes—“to think that you didn’t know.”

“Oh—that’s all.” Tom tapped his thick fingers together like a priest and leaned back in his chair.

“You’re crazy!” he exploded. “I can’t speak about what happened five years ago, because I didn’t know Daisy then. And I’ll be damned if I see how you got within a mile of her. Unless you brought the groceries to the back door! But all the rest of that’s a God damned lie. Daisy loved me when she married me and she loves me now.”

“No,” said Gatsby, shaking his head.

“She does, though. The trouble is that sometimes she gets foolish ideas in her head and doesn’t know what she’s doing.” He nodded wisely. “And what’s more, I love Daisy too. Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself. But I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time.”

“You’re revolting,” said Daisy. She turned to me. Her voice dropped much lower, and it filled the room with thrilling scorn. “Do you know why we left Chicago? I’m surprised that they didn’t treat you to the story of that little spree.”

Gatsby walked over and stood beside her.

“Daisy, that’s all over now,” he said seriously. “It doesn’t matter any more. Just tell him the truth—that you never loved him—and it’s all wiped out forever.”

She looked at him blindly. “Why—how could I love him—possibly?”

“You never loved him.”

She hesitated. Her eyes turned to Jordan and me, as if she were asking for help. It was as though she realized at last what she was doing. And it was as though she had never, all along, meant to do anything at all. But it was done now. It was too late.

“I never loved him,” she said. It was clear that she did not want to say it.

“Not at Kapiolani?” Tom asked suddenly.

“No.”

From the ballroom below, music was drifting up on hot waves of air. The chords sounded soft and heavy, and they made the air hard to breathe.

“Not that day I carried you down from the Punch Bowl to keep your shoes dry?” There was a husky tenderness in his voice… “Daisy?”

“Please don’t.” Her voice was cold, but the bitterness had gone from it. She looked at Gatsby. “There, Jay,” she said. But her hand was trembling as she tried to light a cigarette. Suddenly she threw the cigarette and the burning match on the carpet.

“Oh, you want too much!” she cried to Gatsby. “I love you now—isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s past.” She began to cry helplessly. “I did love him once—but I loved you too.”

Gatsby’s eyes opened and closed.

“You loved me *too*?” he repeated.

“Even that’s a lie,” said Tom savagely. “She didn’t know you were alive. Why—there’s things between Daisy and me that you’ll never know. Things that neither of us can ever forget.”

The words seemed to bite into Gatsby's body.

“I want to speak to Daisy alone,” he insisted. “She’s all excited now—”

“Even alone I can’t say I never loved Tom,” she admitted in a pitiful voice. “It wouldn’t be true.”

“Of course it wouldn’t,” Tom agreed.

She turned to her husband.

“As if it mattered to you,” she said.

“Of course it matters. I’m going to take better care of you from now on.”

“You don’t understand,” said Gatsby. There was a touch of panic in his voice. “You’re not going to take care of her any more.”

“I’m not?” Tom opened his eyes wide and laughed. He could easily stay calm now. “Why’s that?”

“Daisy’s leaving you.”

“Nonsense.”

“I am, though,” she said with a visible effort.

“She’s not leaving me!” Suddenly Tom’s words seemed to lean down over Gatsby. “Certainly not for a common swindler who’d have to steal the ring he put on her finger.”

“I won’t stand this!” cried Daisy. “Oh, please let’s get out.”

“Who are you, anyhow?” Tom burst out. “You’re one of that bunch that hangs around with Meyer Wolfshiem—that much I happen to know. I’ve made a little investigation into your affairs. And I’ll carry it further tomorrow.”

“You can do as you like about that, old sport,” Gatsby said steadily.

“I found out what your ‘drugstores’ were.” Tom turned to us and spoke fast. “He and this Wolfshiem bought up a lot of side-street drugstores here and in Chicago. They sold grain alcohol over the counter. That’s one of his little tricks. I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him, and I wasn’t far wrong.”

“What about it?” said Gatsby politely. “I guess your friend Walter Chase wasn’t too proud to come in on it.”

“And you left him alone when he was in trouble, didn’t you? You let him go to jail for a month over in New Jersey. God! You ought to hear Walter on the subject of *you*.”

“He came to us completely broke. He was very glad to pick up some money, old sport.”

“Don’t you call me ‘old sport’!” cried Tom. Gatsby said nothing. “Walter could take you to court for breaking the betting laws too. But Wolfshiem scared him into shutting his mouth.”

That strange look was back again in Gatsby’s face. It was unfamiliar to me, and yet I recognized it.

“That drugstore business was just small change,” Tom went on slowly. “But you’ve got something going now that Walter’s afraid to tell me about.”

I glanced at Daisy. She was staring in terror from Gatsby to her husband and back. Then I looked at Jordan. She had begun to balance an invisible but very interesting object on the tip of her chin. Then I turned back to Gatsby—and his expression shocked me. He looked as if he had “killed a man.” I say this with complete contempt for the silly gossip in his garden. But for a moment his face could be described in just that strange way.

It passed. He began to talk excitedly to Daisy. He denied everything. He defended his name against accusations that nobody had made. But with every word she drew further and further into herself. So he gave that up. Only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away. It tried to touch what could no longer be touched. It struggled unhappily, but without giving up hope, toward that lost voice across the room.

The voice begged again to go.

“*Please*, Tom! I can’t stand this any more.”

Her frightened eyes showed that her plans and her courage, whatever they had been, were completely gone.

“You two start on home, Daisy,” said Tom. “In Mr. Gatsby’s car.”

She looked at Tom, alarmed now. But he insisted, with generous scorn.

“Go on. He won’t annoy you. I think he realizes that his presumptuous little flirtation is over.”

They were gone without a word. In a moment they had been snapped out of our lives. They were suddenly alone and unimportant, like ghosts. Even our pity could not reach them.

After a moment Tom got up. He began to wrap the unopened bottle of whisky in the towel.

“Want any of this stuff? Jordan?… Nick?”

I didn’t answer.

“Nick?” he asked again.

“What?”

“Want any?”

“No… I just remembered that today’s my birthday.”

I was thirty. In front of me stretched the dark, threatening road of a new decade.

It was seven o’clock when we got into the coupé with him and started for Long Island. Tom talked all the time. He was laughing and pleased with his victory. But his voice was far away from Jordan and me. It was as far away as the foreign noise on the sidewalk, or the roar of the elevated railway overhead. Human sympathy has its limits. We were happy to let all their tragic arguments fade behind us with the city lights. Thirty—the promise of ten years of loneliness. A shorter and shorter list of single men to know. A thinner and thinner briefcase of enthusiasm. Thinner and thinner hair. But Jordan was beside me. She was not like Daisy. She was too wise to carry old dreams, which were better forgotten, from one age of her life to the next. As we passed over the dark bridge, her pale face fell lazily against the shoulder of my coat. Her hand pressed mine and comforted me. And the frightening blow of being thirty died away.

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

The young Greek, Michaelis, ran the coffee place beside the ash-heaps. He was the main witness at the inquest. He had slept through the heat until after five o’clock. Then he walked over to the garage. He found George Wilson sick in his office—really sick. Wilson was as pale as his own pale hair, and he was shaking all over. Michaelis told him to go to bed. But Wilson refused. He said he would lose a lot of business if he did. While his neighbour was trying to persuade him, there was a violent noise overhead.

“I’ve got my wife locked in up there,” Wilson explained calmly. “She’s going to stay there till the day after tomorrow, and then we’re going to move away.”

Michaelis was amazed. They had been neighbours for four years. In all that time Wilson had never seemed capable of saying anything like that. Usually he was one of those worn-out men. When he wasn’t working, he sat on a chair in the doorway. He stared at the people and the cars that passed along the road. When anyone spoke to him, he always laughed in a pleasant, colourless way. He was his wife’s man and not his own.

So of course Michaelis tried to find out what had happened. But Wilson wouldn’t say a word. Instead he began to throw strange, suspicious looks at his visitor. He asked him what he had been doing at certain times on certain days. Michaelis was beginning to feel uneasy. Just then some workmen came past the door on their way to his restaurant. Michaelis took the chance to get away. He meant to come back later. But he didn’t. He supposed he forgot to, that’s all. He came outside again a little after seven. Then he remembered the conversation, because he heard Mrs. Wilson’s voice. It was loud and angry, downstairs in the garage.

“Beat me!” he heard her cry. “Throw me down and beat me, you dirty little coward!”

A moment later she rushed out into the dusk, waving her hands and shouting. Before he could move from his door, it was all over.

The “death car”, as the newspapers called it, didn’t stop. It came out of the growing darkness. It swerved tragically for a moment, and then it disappeared around the next bend. Mavro Michaelis wasn’t even sure of its colour. He told the first policeman that it was light green. The other car, the one going toward New York, stopped a hundred yards further on. Its driver hurried back to Myrtle Wilson. Her life had been violently ended. She was on her knees in the road, and her thick dark blood was mixing with the dust.

Michaelis and this man reached her first. They tore open her blouse, which was still damp with sweat. Then they saw that her left breast was swinging loose, like a flap. There was no need to listen for the heart under it. Her mouth was wide open and torn a little at the corners. It looked as though she had choked a little as she gave up her great energy for life. She had stored it up for so long.

We saw the three or four cars and the crowd while we were still some distance away.

“Wreck!” said Tom. “That’s good. Wilson’ll have a little business at last.”

He slowed down, but he still did not mean to stop. Then we came nearer. The people at the garage door had quiet, serious faces. When he saw them, he automatically put on the brakes.

“We’ll take a look,” he said doubtfully, “just a look.”

Now I noticed a hollow, wailing sound. It came from the garage and did not stop. We got out of the coupé and walked toward the door. As we did, the sound turned into words. It was “Oh, my God!”, said over and over in a gasping moan.

“There’s some bad trouble here,” said Tom excitedly.

He stood on his toes and looked over a circle of heads into the garage. The only light was a yellow lamp in a swinging metal basket overhead. Then he made a harsh sound in his throat. With a violent push of his powerful arms, he forced his way through.

The circle closed up again, and people murmured complaints. For a minute I could not see anything at all. Then more people arrived and broke the line. Jordan and I were suddenly pushed inside.

Myrtle Wilson’s body lay on a worktable by the wall. It was wrapped in a blanket, and then in another blanket, as if she felt cold on that hot night. Tom stood with his back to us, bending over it, without moving. Next to him stood a motorcycle policeman. He was writing down names in a little book. He was sweating and making many corrections. At first I couldn’t find where the high, groaning words came from. They echoed loudly through the bare garage. Then I saw Wilson. He was standing on the raised step of his office doorway. He was swaying back and forth and holding the doorposts with both hands. Some man was talking to him in a low voice. From time to time the man tried to put a hand on his shoulder. But Wilson neither heard nor saw him. His eyes would drop slowly from the swinging light to the table by the wall, with its heavy load. Then they would jerk back to the light again. And all the time he gave out his high, horrible call:

“Oh, my Ga-od! Oh, my Ga-od! Oh, Ga-od! Oh, my Ga-od!”

Soon Tom lifted his head with a jerk. He stared around the garage with glassy eyes. Then he mumbled something unclear to the policeman.

“*M*-*a*-*v*—” the policeman was saying, “—*o*—”

“No, *r*—” the man corrected him, “*M*-*a*-*v*-*r*-*o*—”

“Listen to me!” Tom said fiercely, under his breath.

“*r*—” said the policeman, “*o*—”

“*g*—”

“*g*—” He looked up as Tom’s broad hand fell hard on his shoulder. “What you want, fella?”

“What happened?—that’s what I want to know.”

“Auto hit her. Ins’antly killed.”

“Instantly killed,” Tom repeated, staring.

“She ran out ina road. Son-of-a-bitch didn’t even stopus car.”

“There was two cars,” said Michaelis, “one comin’, one goin’, see?”

“Going where?” the policeman asked sharply.

“One goin’ each way. Well, she”—his hand rose toward the blankets, but it stopped halfway and fell to his side—“she ran out there. An’ the one comin’ from N’York knock right into her. Goin’ thirty or forty miles an hour.”

“What’s the name of this place here?” the officer demanded.

“Hasn’t got any name.”

A pale, well-dressed negro stepped near.

“It was a yellow car,” he said, “big yellow car. New.”

“See the accident?” asked the policeman.

“No, but the car passed me down the road, going faster’n forty. Going fifty, sixty.”

“Come here and let’s have your name. Look out now. I want to get his name.”

Some words of this conversation must have reached Wilson, who was swaying in the office door. Suddenly a new idea came into his gasping cries:

“You don’t have to tell me what kind of car it was! I know what kind of car it was!”

I was watching Tom. I saw the thick muscle behind his shoulder grow tight under his coat. He walked quickly over to Wilson. He stood in front of him and took a firm hold of his upper arms.

“You’ve got to pull yourself together,” he said. His voice was rough but calming.

Wilson’s eyes fell on Tom. He rose up on his toes. He would have fallen to his knees if Tom had not held him up.

“Listen,” said Tom, shaking him a little. “I just got here a minute ago, from New York. I was bringing you that coupé we’ve been talking about. That yellow car I was driving this afternoon wasn’t mine—do you hear? I haven’t seen it all afternoon.”

Only the negro and I were near enough to hear what he said. But the policeman noticed something in the tone. He looked over with aggressive eyes.

“What’s all that?” he demanded.

“I’m a friend of his.” Tom turned his head, but he kept his hands firmly on Wilson’s body. “He says he knows the car that did it… It was a yellow car.”

Some unclear feeling made the policeman look suspiciously at Tom.

“And what colour’s your car?”

“It’s a blue car, a coupé.”

“We’ve come straight from New York,” I said.

Someone who had been driving a little behind us said that this was true. The policeman turned away.

“Now, if you’ll let me have that name again correct—”

Tom picked up Wilson like a doll. He carried him into the office, set him down in a chair, and came back.

“If somebody’ll come here and sit with him,” he said sharply, like a man who is used to giving orders. He watched the two men who stood closest. They looked at each other and went unwillingly into the room. Then Tom shut the door on them. He came down the single step, and his eyes avoided the table. As he passed close to me, he whispered: “Let’s get out.”

We pushed through the crowd, which was still growing. Tom’s commanding arms opened the way. We felt awkward and self-conscious. We passed a doctor who was hurrying in with his case in his hand. Someone had sent for him half an hour ago, in wild hope.

Tom drove slowly until we were past the bend. Then his foot came down hard, and the coupé raced along through the night. After a little while I heard a low, husky sob. I saw that tears were running down his face.

“The God damned coward!” he cried softly. “He didn’t even stop his car.”

The Buchanans’ house suddenly seemed to float toward us through the dark, rustling trees. Tom stopped beside the porch and looked up at the second floor. There, two windows bloomed with light among the vines.

“Daisy’s home,” he said. As we got out of the car, he glanced at me and frowned slightly.

“I ought to have dropped you in West Egg, Nick. There’s nothing we can do tonight.”

A change had come over him. He spoke seriously and firmly. As we walked across the moonlit gravel to the porch, he dealt with the situation in a few quick sentences.

“I’ll telephone for a taxi to take you home. And while you’re waiting, you and Jordan better go in the kitchen and have them get you some supper—if you want any.” He opened the door. “Come in.”

“No, thanks. But I’d be glad if you’d order me the taxi. I’ll wait outside.”

Jordan put her hand on my arm.

“Won’t you come in, Nick?”

“No, thanks.”

I was feeling a little sick and I wanted to be alone. But Jordan stayed for a moment longer.

“It’s only half-past nine,” she said.

I’d be damned if I’d go in. I’d had enough of all of them for one day, and suddenly that included Jordan too. She must have seen something of this in my face. She turned away suddenly and ran up the porch steps into the house. I sat down for a few minutes with my head in my hands. Then I heard someone pick up the phone inside, and the butler’s voice calling a taxi. I walked slowly down the drive, away from the house. I meant to wait by the gate.

I hadn’t gone twenty yards when I heard my name. Gatsby stepped from between two bushes into the path. I must have felt pretty strange by that time. I could think of nothing except how brightly his pink suit shone under the moon.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Just standing here, old sport.”

Somehow, that seemed a shameful thing to be doing. For all I knew, he was going to rob the house in a moment. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see evil faces behind him in the dark bushes—the faces of “Wolfshiem’s people.”

“Did you see any trouble on the road?” he asked after a minute.

“Yes.”

He hesitated.

“Was she killed?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so; I told Daisy I thought so. It’s better that the shock should all come at once. She stood it pretty well.”

He spoke as if Daisy’s reaction was the only thing that mattered.

“I got to West Egg by a side road,” he went on, “and left the car in my garage. I don’t think anybody saw us, but of course I can’t be sure.”

I disliked him so much by this time that I didn’t think it necessary to tell him he was wrong.

“Who was the woman?” he asked.

“Her name was Wilson. Her husband owns the garage. How the devil did it happen?”

“Well, I tried to swing the wheel—” He stopped. Suddenly I guessed the truth.

“Was Daisy driving?”

“Yes,” he said after a moment, “but of course I’ll say I was. You see, when we left New York she was very nervous. She thought it would calm her to drive. And this woman rushed out at us just as we were passing a car coming the other way. It all happened in a minute. But it seemed to me that she wanted to speak to us. She thought we were somebody she knew. Well, first Daisy turned away from the woman toward the other car. Then she lost her nerve and turned back. The second my hand reached the wheel I felt the shock. It must have killed her instantly.”

“It ripped her open—”

“Don’t tell me, old sport.” His face twisted with pain. “Anyhow—Daisy stepped on the accelerator. I tried to make her stop, but she couldn’t, so I pulled on the emergency brake. Then she fell over into my lap and I drove on.

“She’ll be all right tomorrow,” he said after a while. “I’m just going to wait here and see if he tries to bother her about that unpleasantness this afternoon. She’s locked herself into her room. And if he tries any brutality, she’s going to turn the light out and on again.”

“He won’t touch her,” I said. “He’s not thinking about her.”

“I don’t trust him, old sport.”

“How long are you going to wait?”

“All night, if necessary. Anyhow, till they all go to bed.”

A new idea came to me. Suppose Tom found out that Daisy had been driving. He might think he saw a connection in it. He might think anything. I looked at the house. There were two or three bright windows downstairs. There was also the pink glow from Daisy’s room on the ground floor.

“You wait here,” I said. “I’ll see if there’s any sign of trouble.”

I walked back along the edge of the lawn. I crossed the gravel softly and went on tiptoe up the veranda steps. The drawing-room curtains were open, and I saw that the room was empty. I crossed the porch where we had eaten dinner that June night three months before. Then I came to a small rectangle of light. I guessed it was the pantry window. The blind was down, but I found a small gap at the bottom.

Daisy and Tom were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table. There was a plate of cold fried chicken between them, and two bottles of ale. He was talking seriously to her across the table. In his eagerness his hand had fallen on hers and covered it. Every now and then she looked up at him and nodded in agreement.

They weren’t happy. Neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale. And yet they weren’t unhappy either. There was a clear feeling of natural closeness about the picture. Anybody would have said that they were planning something together in secret.

As I tiptoed away from the porch, I heard my taxi. It was feeling its way along the dark road toward the house. Gatsby was waiting where I had left him in the drive.

“Is it all quiet up there?” he asked anxiously.

“Yes, it’s all quiet.” I hesitated. “You’d better come home and get some sleep.”

He shook his head.

“I want to wait here till Daisy goes to bed. Good night, old sport.”

He put his hands in his coat pockets. Then he turned back eagerly to watch the house closely. It was as though my presence spoiled the holiness of his vigil. So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight—watching over nothing.

### Glossary

- **Trimalchio**: a rich man in an old Roman story who gave huge, showy parties.
- **commutation ticket**: a season ticket for a train that you take to work every day.
- **awnings**: pieces of cloth over windows that keep out the sun.
- **idol**: a statue of a god that people pray to.
- **holding down the receiver**: pressing down the phone so that nobody is on the line, and only pretending to talk.
- **gin rickey**: a cold alcoholic drink made with gin, lime and water.
- **morbid**: thinking too much about sad or dark things, like death.
- **indiscreet**: showing or telling things that should stay secret.
- **standard shift**: a car in which the driver changes the gears by hand.
- **medium**: a person who says they can talk to the dead.
- **swell**: very good, very fine (an informal word).
- **row**: a noisy argument or fight.
- **make love to**: here, an old way of saying to try to win a woman’s love; to flirt with her.
- **spree**: a short time of wild fun, usually with drinking or other women.
- **swindler**: a person who cheats people to get money.
- **grain alcohol**: strong, pure alcohol; in the 1920s it was illegal to sell it as a drink.
- **bootlegger**: a person who makes or sells alcohol illegally.
- **presumptuous**: too bold; doing something you have no right to do.
- **flirtation**: a short, not very serious love game between two people.
- **decade**: a period of ten years.
- **inquest**: an official meeting to find out how someone died.
- **emergency brake**: a brake you pull by hand to stop a car.
- **vigil**: staying awake at night to watch or wait.
- **pantry**: a small room next to the kitchen where food and dishes are kept.

## VIII

I couldn’t sleep all night. A foghorn was groaning on the Sound without stopping. I turned from side to side, half-sick. I moved between a strange, ugly reality and wild, frightening dreams. Toward dawn I heard a taxi go up Gatsby’s drive. I jumped out of bed at once and began to dress. I felt that I had something to tell him, something to warn him about. In the morning it would be too late.

As I crossed his lawn, I saw that his front door was still open. He was leaning against a table in the hall. He looked heavy, from sadness or from sleep.

“Nothing happened,” he said weakly. “I waited, and about four o’clock she came to the window. She stood there for a minute and then turned out the light.”

His house had never seemed so enormous to me as it did that night. We hunted through the great rooms for cigarettes. We pushed aside curtains that were as big as tents. We felt along endless dark walls for the light switches. Once I fell, with a sort of splash of sound, onto the keys of a ghostly piano. There was a strange amount of dust everywhere. The rooms smelled old and close, as if nobody had opened the windows for many days. I found the cigarette box on a table I didn’t know. There were two old, dry cigarettes inside. We threw open the French windows of the drawing-room and sat smoking out into the darkness.

“You ought to go away,” I said. “It’s pretty certain they’ll trace your car.”

“Go away *now*, old sport?”

“Go to Atlantic City for a week, or up to Montreal.”

He wouldn’t think about it. He couldn’t possibly leave Daisy until he knew what she was going to do. He was holding on to some last hope. I couldn’t bear to shake him free of it.

It was on this night that he told me the strange story of his youth with Dan Cody. He told it to me because “Jay Gatsby” had broken like glass against Tom’s hard cruelty. The long, secret, wonderful show was over. I think that he would have admitted anything now, openly. But he wanted to talk about Daisy.

She was the first “nice” girl he had ever known. He had come near people like her before, in different ways that he never explained. But there had always been a kind of invisible barbed wire between them and him. He found her exciting and he wanted her. He went to her house, at first with other officers from Camp Taylor, then alone. It amazed him. He had never been in such a beautiful house before. But the thing that made it so breathlessly exciting was that Daisy lived there. The house was as ordinary a thing to her as his tent at the camp was to him.

There was a rich mystery about the house. It made him think of bedrooms upstairs that were more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms. It made him think of happy, shining activities in its corridors. It made him think of romances that were not old and put away, like dry flowers in a drawer. These romances were fresh and alive. They smelled of this year’s shining motorcars, and of dances whose flowers had hardly died. It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy. That made her worth more in his eyes. He felt those men all around the house. Their feelings still seemed to fill the air, like shadows and echoes.

But he knew that he was in Daisy’s house by a huge accident. His future as Jay Gatsby might be glorious. But at present he was a young man with no money and no past. At any moment his uniform, which hid all this like an invisible coat, might slip from his shoulders. So he made the most of his time. He took what he could get, hungrily and without thinking whether it was right. In the end he took Daisy one still October night. He took her because he had no real right even to touch her hand.

He might have hated himself for it, because he had certainly taken her under false pretences. I don’t mean that he had talked about millions that he didn’t have. But he had deliberately given Daisy a feeling of safety. He let her believe that he came from much the same class as she did. He let her believe that he was fully able to take care of her. In fact, he had nothing like that. He had no comfortable family behind him. And a cold, distant government could send him anywhere in the world whenever it wanted.

But he didn’t hate himself, and it didn’t turn out the way he had imagined. He had probably planned to take what he could and then go. But now he found that he had given himself to the search for a grail. He knew that Daisy was extraordinary. But he didn’t realize how extraordinary a “nice” girl could be. She disappeared into her rich house, into her rich, full life. She left Gatsby with nothing. He felt married to her, that was all.

When they met again, two days later, it was Gatsby who was breathless. In some way, he was the one who felt betrayed. Her porch was bright with starlight, a luxury that money had bought. The wicker of the seat squeaked in a fashionable way as she turned toward him. He kissed her curious and lovely mouth. She had caught a cold. It made her voice lower and more charming than ever. Gatsby felt very strongly the youth and mystery that wealth keeps safe, like something in a prison. He felt the freshness of many clothes. And he felt Daisy, shining like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.

“I can’t describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport. I even hoped for a while that she’d throw me over. But she didn’t, because she was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her… Well, there I was, far away from my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute. And all of a sudden I didn’t care. What was the use of doing great things? I could have a better time just telling her what I was going to do.”

On the last afternoon before he went abroad, he sat with Daisy in his arms for a long, silent time. It was a cold autumn day. There was a fire in the room, and her cheeks were red. Now and then she moved, and he changed the position of his arm a little. Once he kissed her dark shining hair. The afternoon had made them calm for a while. It was as if it wanted to give them a deep memory. A long parting would start the next day. In their month of love they had never been closer. They had never understood each other more deeply than in those moments. She touched his coat’s shoulder with her silent lips. He touched the ends of her fingers gently, as if she were asleep.

He did extraordinarily well in the war. He was a captain before he went to the front. After the Argonne battles he became a major. He got the command of the division’s machine-guns. After the armistice he tried desperately to get home. But some problem or mistake sent him to Oxford instead. He was worried now. There was a kind of nervous despair in Daisy’s letters. She didn’t see why he couldn’t come. She was feeling the pressure of the world around her. She wanted to see him and feel him beside her. She wanted to know for sure that she was doing the right thing after all.

Daisy was young, and her artificial world smelled of orchids. It was full of pleasant, cheerful snobbery. Its orchestras set the rhythm of the year. They put all the sadness and the promise of life into new tunes. All night the saxophones cried the hopeless words of the “Beale Street Blues.” A hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers moved through the shining dust. At the grey tea hour there were always rooms that beat all the time with this low, sweet fever. Fresh young faces floated here and there, like rose petals blown around the floor by the sad horns.

Through this twilight world Daisy began to move again with the season. Suddenly she was again meeting half a dozen men a day, one after another. At dawn she fell asleep, and the beads and silk of her evening dress lay on the floor beside her bed. They lay there among dying orchids. And all the time something inside her was crying out for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately. The decision had to be made by some force that was close at hand. It could be love, or money, or plain, clear common sense.

That force took shape in the middle of spring, when Tom Buchanan arrived. There was a healthy, solid bigness about his body and his position in the world, and Daisy was flattered. No doubt there was a certain struggle inside her, and also a certain relief. The letter reached Gatsby while he was still at Oxford.

It was dawn now on Long Island. We went around opening the rest of the windows downstairs. The house filled with light that turned from grey to gold. The shadow of a tree fell suddenly across the dew. Ghostly birds began to sing among the blue leaves. There was a slow, pleasant movement in the air. It was hardly a wind, and it promised a cool, lovely day.

“I don’t think she ever loved him.” Gatsby turned around from a window and looked at me as if he wanted me to argue. “You must remember, old sport, she was very excited this afternoon. He told her those things in a way that frightened her. He made it look as if I was some kind of cheap cheat. And the result was that she hardly knew what she was saying.”

He sat down sadly.

“Of course she might have loved him just for a minute, when they were first married. And loved me more even then, do you see?”

Suddenly he said something strange.

“In any case,” he said, “it was just personal.”

What could you make of that? I could only guess that his idea of the whole affair had a strength that nobody could measure.

He came back from France while Tom and Daisy were still on their wedding trip. With the last of his army pay he made a journey to Louisville. It made him miserable, but he couldn’t stop himself. He stayed there a week. He walked the streets where their footsteps had sounded together through the November night. He went back to the quiet, faraway places where they had driven in her white car. Daisy’s house had always seemed more mysterious and happy to him than other houses. In the same way, the whole city seemed full of a sad beauty to him. It was like that even though she was gone from it.

He left with the feeling that he might have found her if he had searched harder. He felt that he was leaving her behind. He had no money now, so he travelled in a cheap day-coach, and it was hot. He went out to the open space between the cars and sat down on a folding chair. The station slid away, and the backs of strange buildings moved past. Then the train went out into the spring fields. For a minute a yellow tram raced beside them. The people in it might once have seen the pale magic of her face in the street.

The track curved, and now the train was going away from the sun. The sun sank lower. It seemed to spread itself like a blessing over the disappearing city where she had lived. He stretched out his hand desperately, as if he wanted to catch just a little bit of air. He wanted to save a small piece of the place that she had made lovely for him. But everything was going by too fast now for his tired, wet eyes. He knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.

It was nine o’clock when we finished breakfast and went out on the porch. The night had made a sharp change in the weather. There was a taste of autumn in the air. The gardener came to the bottom of the steps. He was the last of Gatsby’s old servants.

“I’m going to drain the pool today, Mr. Gatsby. Leaves’ll start falling pretty soon, and then there’s always trouble with the pipes.”

“Don’t do it today,” Gatsby answered. He turned to me as if he were sorry. “You know, old sport, I’ve never used that pool all summer?”

I looked at my watch and stood up.

“Twelve minutes to my train.”

I didn’t want to go to the city. I wasn’t able to do any good work that day. But it was more than that. I didn’t want to leave Gatsby. I missed that train, and then another one, before I could make myself go.

“I’ll call you up,” I said finally.

“Do, old sport.”

“I’ll call you about noon.”

We walked slowly down the steps.

“I suppose Daisy’ll call too.” He looked at me anxiously, as if he hoped I would agree.

“I suppose so.”

“Well, goodbye.”

We shook hands and I started away. Just before I reached the hedge, I remembered something and turned around.

“They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”

I’ve always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. First he nodded politely. Then his face broke into that bright, understanding smile of his. It was as if we had always shared that secret happily together. His beautiful, worn pink suit made a bright spot of colour against the white steps. I thought of the night when I first came to his grand old family home, three months before. The lawn and the drive had been crowded with the faces of people who guessed that he was dishonest. And he had stood on those steps and waved them goodbye. He had hidden his dream, which nothing could make dishonest.

I thanked him for his hospitality. We were always thanking him for that, I and the others.

“Goodbye,” I called. “I enjoyed breakfast, Gatsby.”

Up in the city, I tried for a while to write down the prices of an endless list of stocks. Then I fell asleep in my office chair. Just before noon the phone woke me. I jumped up with sweat on my forehead. It was Jordan Baker. She often called me at this hour. She moved around between hotels and clubs and private houses. Because of this, it was hard to find her in any other way. Usually her voice came over the telephone fresh and cool. It was like a little piece of grass from a green golf course flying in at the office window. But this morning it seemed hard and dry.

“I’ve left Daisy’s house,” she said. “I’m at Hempstead, and I’m going down to Southampton this afternoon.”

It was probably polite and wise to leave Daisy’s house. But it annoyed me, and her next words made me go stiff.

“You weren’t so nice to me last night.”

“How could it have mattered then?”

There was silence for a moment. Then:

“However—I want to see you.”

“I want to see you, too.”

“Suppose I don’t go to Southampton, and come into town this afternoon?”

“No—I don’t think this afternoon.”

“Very well.”

“It’s impossible this afternoon. Various—”

We talked like that for a while. And then suddenly we weren’t talking any longer. I don’t know which of us put the phone down with a sharp click. But I know I didn’t care. I couldn’t have talked to her across a tea table that day. Not even if I never talked to her again in this world.

A few minutes later I called Gatsby’s house, but the line was busy. I tried four times. Finally an annoyed operator told me that the line was being kept open for a long-distance call from Detroit. I took out my timetable and drew a small circle around the three-fifty train. Then I leaned back in my chair and tried to think. It was just noon.

That morning, when my train passed the ash-heaps, I had crossed on purpose to the other side of the car. I supposed there would be a curious crowd around there all day. Little boys would be looking for dark spots in the dust. Some talkative man would tell the story of what happened, again and again. In the end it would become less and less real even to him, and he couldn’t tell it any longer. And Myrtle Wilson’s tragic end would be forgotten. Now I want to go back a little. I want to tell what happened at the garage after we left the night before.

They had trouble finding the sister, Catherine. She must have broken her rule against drinking that night. When she arrived, she was stupid with alcohol. She couldn’t understand that the ambulance had already gone to Flushing. When they finally made her understand, she fainted at once. It was as if that was the part she couldn’t bear. Someone, kind or curious, took her in his car. He drove her after her sister’s body.

Until long after midnight a changing crowd pressed against the front of the garage, like waves on a beach. Inside, George Wilson rocked himself back and forth on the couch. For a while the door of the office was open. Everyone who came into the garage couldn’t stop themselves from looking through it. Finally someone said it was a shame and closed the door. Michaelis and several other men were with Wilson. First there were four or five men, later two or three. Still later Michaelis asked the last stranger to wait there fifteen minutes longer. Michaelis went back to his own place and made a pot of coffee. After that, he stayed there alone with Wilson until dawn.

About three o’clock Wilson’s confused muttering changed. He grew quieter and began to talk about the yellow car. He said that he had a way of finding out who the yellow car belonged to. Then suddenly he said that a couple of months ago his wife had come home from the city with a bruised face and a swollen nose.

But when he heard himself say this, he jumped as if in pain. He began to cry “Oh, my God!” again in his groaning voice. Michaelis tried clumsily to make him think about something else.

“How long have you been married, George? Come on there, try and sit still a minute, and answer my question. How long have you been married?”

“Twelve years.”

“Ever had any children? Come on, George, sit still—I asked you a question. Did you ever have any children?”

The hard brown beetles kept hitting the weak light with little thuds. Sometimes Michaelis heard a car racing along the road outside. Each time it sounded to him like the car that hadn’t stopped a few hours before. He didn’t like to go into the garage, because the workbench was stained where the body had been lying. So he moved uncomfortably around the office. By the morning he knew every object in it. From time to time he sat down beside Wilson and tried to keep him quieter.

“Have you got a church you go to sometimes, George? Maybe even if you haven’t been there for a long time? Maybe I could call up the church and get a priest to come over and he could talk to you, see?”

“Don’t belong to any.”

“You ought to have a church, George, for times like this. You must have gone to church once. Didn’t you get married in a church? Listen, George, listen to me. Didn’t you get married in a church?”

“That was a long time ago.”

The effort of answering broke the rhythm of his rocking. For a moment he was silent. Then the same half-knowing, half-confused look came back into his tired, pale eyes.

“Look in the drawer there,” he said, pointing at the desk.

“Which drawer?”

“That drawer—that one.”

Michaelis opened the drawer nearest his hand. There was nothing in it but a small, expensive dog-leash. It was made of leather and silver threads. It seemed to be new.

“This?” he asked, holding it up.

Wilson stared and nodded.

“I found it yesterday afternoon. She tried to tell me about it, but I knew it was something funny.”

“You mean your wife bought it?”

“She had it wrapped in tissue paper on her chest of drawers.”

Michaelis didn’t see anything strange in that. He gave Wilson a dozen reasons why his wife might have bought the dog-leash. But perhaps Wilson had heard some of the same explanations before, from Myrtle. He began saying “Oh, my God!” again in a whisper. So Michaelis didn’t finish several of his explanations.

“Then he killed her,” said Wilson. His mouth suddenly dropped open.

“Who did?”

“I have a way of finding out.”

“You’re morbid, George,” said his friend. “This has been a strain to you and you don’t know what you’re saying. You’d better try and sit quiet till morning.”

“He murdered her.”

“It was an accident, George.”

Wilson shook his head. His eyes became narrow. His mouth widened a little, with the ghost of a proud “Hm!”

“I know,” he said firmly. “I’m one of these trusting fellas and I don’t think any harm to *no*body. But when I get to know a thing, I know it. It was the man in that car. She ran out to speak to him and he wouldn’t stop.”

Michaelis had seen this too. But he hadn’t thought that it meant anything special. He believed that Mrs. Wilson had been running away from her husband. He didn’t think she was trying to stop any particular car.

“How could she of been like that?”

“She’s a deep one,” said Wilson, as if that answered the question. “Ah-h-h—”

He began to rock again. Michaelis stood there, twisting the leash in his hand.

“Maybe you got some friend that I could telephone for, George?”

This was a hopeless hope. He was almost sure that Wilson had no friend. There was not even enough of Wilson for his wife. A little later Michaelis was glad to notice a change in the room. There was a blue light growing by the window. He realized that dawn wasn’t far away. About five o’clock it was blue enough outside to turn off the light.

Wilson’s glassy eyes turned to the ash-heaps outside. There, small grey clouds took strange shapes and hurried here and there in the light dawn wind.

“I spoke to her,” he muttered, after a long silence. “I told her she might fool me but she couldn’t fool God. I took her to the window”—with an effort he got up and walked to the back window. He leaned there with his face pressed against it—“and I said, ‘God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!’ ”

Michaelis was standing behind him. He saw with a shock that Wilson was looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. They had just come out, pale and enormous, from the disappearing night.

“God sees everything,” said Wilson again.

“That’s an advertisement,” Michaelis told him. Something made him turn away from the window and look back into the room. But Wilson stood there for a long time, his face close to the glass, nodding into the half-light.

By six o’clock Michaelis was worn out. He was grateful when he heard a car stop outside. It was one of the watchers of the night before, who had promised to come back. So Michaelis cooked breakfast for three, and he and the other man ate it together. Wilson was quieter now, and Michaelis went home to sleep. He woke four hours later and hurried back to the garage. Wilson was gone.

Later, people followed the way he had gone. He was on foot all the time. He went to Port Roosevelt and then to Gad’s Hill. There he bought a sandwich that he didn’t eat, and a cup of coffee. He must have been tired and walking slowly, because he didn’t reach Gad’s Hill until noon. Up to that point it was easy to explain where he had been. Some boys had seen a man “acting sort of crazy.” And some drivers remembered a man by the side of the road who stared at them strangely. Then for three hours he disappeared. Wilson had told Michaelis that he “had a way of finding out.” Because of this, the police supposed that he spent those hours going from garage to garage in the area. They thought he was asking about a yellow car. But no garage man who had seen him ever came forward. Perhaps he had an easier, surer way of finding out what he wanted to know. By half-past two he was in West Egg. There he asked someone the way to Gatsby’s house. So by that time he knew Gatsby’s name.

At two o’clock Gatsby put on his bathing suit. He told the butler that if anyone phoned, someone should bring him the message at the pool. He stopped at the garage for a pneumatic mattress that his guests had enjoyed during the summer. The chauffeur helped him to pump it up. Then Gatsby gave orders that nobody should take out the open car for any reason. This was strange, because the front right fender needed repair.

Gatsby put the mattress on his shoulder and started for the pool. Once he stopped and moved it a little. The chauffeur asked him if he needed help. But he shook his head, and in a moment he disappeared among the yellowing trees.

No telephone message arrived. But the butler went without sleep and waited for it until four o’clock. He waited until long after there was anyone to give it to. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come. Perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true, he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world. He must have felt that he had paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at a strange sky through frightening leaves. He must have shivered as he found how ugly and strange a rose is. And how hard the sunlight was on the new, thin grass. It was a new world, made of things but not real. In it poor ghosts floated around by chance, breathing dreams like air… They were like that grey, ash-coloured, strange figure. It was moving toward him through the shapeless trees.

The chauffeur heard the shots. He was one of Wolfshiem’s protégés. Afterwards he could only say that he hadn’t thought much about them. I drove from the station straight to Gatsby’s house. I rushed anxiously up the front steps, and that was the first thing that frightened anyone. But they knew then, I firmly believe. With hardly a word, four of us hurried down to the pool: the chauffeur, the butler, the gardener and I.

There was a weak, hardly visible movement in the water. Fresh water was flowing in at one end and pushing its way toward the drain at the other. There were little ripples, which were hardly even the shadows of waves. With them, the mattress and its load moved unevenly down the pool. A small breath of wind hardly moved the surface. But it was enough to change the accidental path of the mattress with its accidental load. A group of leaves touched it, and it turned slowly round. As it turned, it drew a thin red circle in the water, like the leg of a measuring instrument.

We started toward the house with Gatsby. It was after this that the gardener saw Wilson’s body a little way off in the grass. And the destruction was complete.

### Glossary

- **foghorn**: a loud horn that warns ships when there is fog
- **barbed wire**: wire with sharp points, used to keep people out
- **false pretences**: making someone believe something that is not true
- **grail**: a holy cup from old stories; knights spent their lives searching for it
- **armistice**: the agreement to stop fighting at the end of the war (November 1918)
- **day-coach**: a cheap train car with seats, used for travelling in the day
- **operator**: a person who connected telephone calls in the past
- **morbid**: thinking too much about death and terrible things
- **dog-leash**: a strap to hold a dog when walking
- **protégé**: a young person whom a powerful person helps and teaches
- **pneumatic mattress**: a bed that you fill with air, used in water
- **fender**: the metal part over a car wheel

## IX

Two years have passed. I remember the rest of that day, and that night and the next day, only as one endless march. Police and photographers and newspaper men went in and out of Gatsby’s front door. A rope was stretched across the main gate, and a policeman stood by it to keep out curious people. But little boys soon discovered that they could come in through my yard. There were always a few of them standing together around the pool, with their mouths open. That afternoon someone bent over Wilson’s body and used the word “madman.” He had a confident manner, and perhaps he was a detective. His voice sounded important only by chance. But it decided the tone of the newspaper reports the next morning.

Most of those reports were a nightmare. They were strange, full of details, eager, and untrue. At the inquest Michaelis gave his evidence, and it showed that Wilson had suspected his wife. Then I thought the whole story would soon appear as a cheap, shocking joke in the papers. But Catherine, who might have said anything, didn’t say a word. She showed a surprising amount of character about it, too. She looked at the coroner with determined eyes under her painted eyebrows. She swore that her sister had never seen Gatsby. She swore that her sister was completely happy with her husband. She swore that her sister had done nothing wrong at all. She believed it herself, and she cried into her handkerchief. It was as if the very idea was more than she could bear. So Wilson became simply a man who had gone mad “from grief.” That way the case could stay as simple as possible. And it stayed there.

But all this part of it seemed far away and not important. I found myself on Gatsby’s side, and alone. I telephoned the news of the terrible event to West Egg village. From that moment, every guess about him and every practical question came to me. At first I was surprised and confused. Then hour after hour he lay in his house, and he didn’t move or breathe or speak. Slowly I began to feel that I was responsible, because no one else was interested. I mean that nobody had that strong, personal interest in him. Everyone has some kind of right to that at the end.

I called Daisy half an hour after we found him. I called her without thinking and without waiting. But she and Tom had gone away early that afternoon, and they had taken luggage with them.

“Left no address?”

“No.”

“Say when they’d be back?”

“No.”

“Any idea where they are? How I could reach them?”

“I don’t know. Can’t say.”

I wanted to get somebody for him. I wanted to go into the room where he lay and make him feel better. “I’ll get somebody for you, Gatsby. Don’t worry. Just trust me and I’ll get somebody for you—”

Meyer Wolfshiem’s name wasn’t in the phone book. The butler gave me his office address on Broadway, and I called Information. But by the time I had the number, it was long after five. No one answered the phone.

“Will you ring again?”

“I’ve rung three times.”

“It’s very important.”

“Sorry. I’m afraid no one’s there.”

I went back to the drawing-room. Suddenly it was full of official people. For a moment I thought they were visitors who had come by chance. They drew back the sheet and looked at Gatsby with shocked eyes. But in my head I could still hear Gatsby asking me for help.

“Look here, old sport, you’ve got to get somebody for me. You’ve got to try hard. I can’t go through this alone.”

Someone started to ask me questions, but I broke away. I went upstairs and looked quickly through the parts of his desk that weren’t locked. He had never told me clearly that his parents were dead. But there was nothing. There was only the picture of Dan Cody on the wall, looking down at me. It was a sign of violence that everyone had forgotten.

The next morning I sent the butler to New York with a letter to Wolfshiem. I asked him for information and begged him to come out on the next train. When I wrote it, the request seemed unnecessary. I was sure he would start out when he saw the newspapers. I was just as sure that a telegram would come from Daisy before noon. But neither a telegram nor Mr. Wolfshiem arrived. Nobody arrived except more police and photographers and newspaper men. Then the butler brought back Wolfshiem’s answer. I began to feel angry and proud. I felt that Gatsby and I stood together against them all, and I despised them.

Dear Mr. Carraway. This has been one of the most terrible shocks of my life to me I hardly can believe it that it is true at all. Such a mad act as that man did should make us all think. I cannot come down now as I am tied up in some very important business and cannot get mixed up in this thing now. If there is anything I can do a little later let me know in a letter by Edgar. I hardly know where I am when I hear about a thing like this and am completely knocked down and out.

Yours truly

Meyer Wolfshiem

And then he had added a quick note below it:

Let me know about the funeral etc do not know his family at all.

That afternoon the phone rang, and Long Distance said that Chicago was calling. I thought this would be Daisy at last. But I heard a man’s voice, very thin and far away.

“This is Slagle speaking…”

“Yes?” I didn’t know the name.

“Hell of a note, isn’t it? Get my wire?”

“There haven’t been any wires.”

“Young Parke’s in trouble,” he said quickly. “They picked him up when he handed the bonds over the counter. They got a circular from New York giving ’em the numbers just five minutes before. What d’you know about that, hey? You never can tell in these hick towns—”

“Hello!” I interrupted breathlessly. “Look here—this isn’t Mr. Gatsby. Mr. Gatsby’s dead.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line. Then I heard a cry of surprise… then a quick squawk as the line went dead.

I think it was on the third day that a telegram arrived from a town in Minnesota. It was signed Henry C. Gatz. It said only that the sender was leaving immediately. It asked us to wait with the funeral until he came.

It was Gatsby’s father. He was a serious old man, very helpless and upset. He was wrapped up in a long, cheap ulster, although it was a warm September day. His eyes were wet with tears all the time because of his excitement. I took the bag and umbrella from his hands. Then he began to pull at his thin grey beard without stopping. It was difficult for me to get his coat off. He looked as if he might fall down. So I took him into the music-room and made him sit down, and I sent for something to eat. But he wouldn’t eat, and the glass of milk spilled from his shaking hand.

“I saw it in the Chicago newspaper,” he said. “It was all in the Chicago newspaper. I started right away.”

“I didn’t know how to reach you.”

His eyes moved around the room all the time, but they saw nothing.

“It was a madman,” he said. “He must have been mad.”

“Wouldn’t you like some coffee?” I asked him again.

“I don’t want anything. I’m all right now, Mr.—”

“Carraway.”

“Well, I’m all right now. Where have they got Jimmy?”

I took him into the drawing-room, where his son lay, and left him there. Some little boys had come up on the steps and were looking into the hall. I told them who had arrived, and they went away unwillingly.

After a little while Mr. Gatz opened the door and came out. His mouth was a little open and his face was slightly red. Single tears fell from his eyes now and then. He was at an age when death is no longer a terrible surprise. Now he looked around him for the first time. He saw the height and the splendour of the hall. He saw the great rooms that opened into other rooms. And his grief began to mix with a kind of amazed pride. I helped him to a bedroom upstairs. While he took off his coat and waistcoat, I told him that we had waited for him before making any plans.

“I didn’t know what you’d want, Mr. Gatsby—”

“Gatz is my name.”

“—Mr. Gatz. I thought you might want to take the body West.”

He shook his head.

“Jimmy always liked it better down East. He rose up to his position in the East. Were you a friend of my boy’s, Mr.—?”

“We were close friends.”

“He had a big future before him, you know. He was only a young man, but he had a lot of brain power here.”

He touched his head in a serious way, and I nodded.

“If he’d of lived, he’d of been a great man. A man like James J. Hill. He’d of helped build up the country.”

“That’s true,” I said. I felt uncomfortable.

He pulled clumsily at the embroidered bedcover, trying to take it off the bed. Then he lay down stiffly and was asleep at once.

That night someone called me up who was clearly frightened. He wanted to know who I was before he would give his name.

“This is Mr. Carraway,” I said.

“Oh!” He sounded relieved. “This is Klipspringer.”

I was relieved too, because that seemed to promise one more friend at Gatsby’s grave. I didn’t want the funeral to be in the papers, because then crowds would come to look. So I had been calling a few people myself. They were hard to find.

“The funeral’s tomorrow,” I said. “Three o’clock, here at the house. I wish you’d tell anybody who’d be interested.”

“Oh, I will,” he said quickly. “Of course I’m not likely to see anybody, but if I do.”

His tone made me suspicious.

“Of course you’ll be there yourself.”

“Well, I’ll certainly try. What I called up about is—”

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “How about saying you’ll come?”

“Well, the fact is—the truth of the matter is that I’m staying with some people up here in Greenwich. And they rather expect me to be with them tomorrow. In fact, there’s a sort of picnic or something. Of course I’ll do my best to get away.”

I couldn’t stop myself from saying a loud “Huh!” He must have heard me, because he went on nervously.

“What I called up about was a pair of shoes I left there. I wonder if it’d be too much trouble to have the butler send them on. You see, they’re tennis shoes, and I’m sort of helpless without them. My address is care of B. F.—”

I didn’t hear the rest of the name, because I put the phone down.

After that I felt a kind of shame for Gatsby. I telephoned one gentleman who suggested that Gatsby had got what he deserved. But that was my fault. That man had been one of those who laughed most cruelly at Gatsby. He had done it when he was brave from drinking Gatsby’s own alcohol. I should have known better than to call him.

On the morning of the funeral I went up to New York to see Meyer Wolfshiem. I couldn’t reach him in any other way. An elevator boy told me which door to try. I pushed it open. It was marked “The Swastika Holding Company.” At first there didn’t seem to be anyone inside. I shouted “hello” several times, but nobody came. Then an argument started behind a thin wall. Soon a lovely Jewess appeared at an inner door. She looked at me carefully with black, unfriendly eyes.

“Nobody’s in,” she said. “Mr. Wolfshiem’s gone to Chicago.”

The first part of this was clearly untrue. Someone inside had begun to whistle “The Rosary,” without any tune.

“Please say that Mr. Carraway wants to see him.”

“I can’t get him back from Chicago, can I?”

At this moment a voice called “Stella!” from the other side of the door. It was clearly Wolfshiem’s voice.

“Leave your name on the desk,” she said quickly. “I’ll give it to him when he gets back.”

“But I know he’s there.”

She took a step toward me. She angrily moved her hands up and down her hips.

“You young men think you can force your way in here any time,” she said crossly. “We’re getting sickantired of it. When I say he’s in Chicago, he’s in Chi*ca*go.”

I mentioned Gatsby.

“Oh-h!” She looked at me again. “Will you just—What was your name?”

She disappeared. In a moment Meyer Wolfshiem stood seriously in the doorway, holding out both hands. He drew me into his office. In a respectful voice he said that it was a sad time for all of us. He offered me a cigar.

“My memory goes back to when first I met him,” he said. “A young major just out of the army and covered over with medals he got in the war. He was so hard up he had to keep on wearing his uniform because he couldn’t buy some regular clothes. First time I saw him was when he came into Winebrenner’s poolroom at Forty-third Street and asked for a job. He hadn’t eat anything for a couple of days. ‘Come on have some lunch with me,’ I said. He ate more than four dollars’ worth of food in half an hour.”

“Did you start him in business?” I asked.

“Start him! I made him.”

“Oh.”

“I raised him up out of nothing, right out of the gutter. I saw right away he was a fine-appearing, gentlemanly young man. And when he told me he was at Oggsford I knew I could use him good. I got him to join the American Legion and he used to stand high there. Right off he did some work for a client of mine up to Albany. We were so thick like that in everything”—he held up two fat fingers—“always together.”

I wondered if this partnership had included the business of the World’s Series in 1919.

“Now he’s dead,” I said after a moment. “You were his closest friend, so I know you’ll want to come to his funeral this afternoon.”

“I’d like to come.”

“Well, come then.”

The hair in his nostrils shook a little. He shook his head, and his eyes filled with tears.

“I can’t do it—I can’t get mixed up in it,” he said.

“There’s nothing to get mixed up in. It’s all over now.”

“When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it in any way. I keep out. When I was a young man it was different. If a friend of mine died, no matter how, I stuck with them to the end. You may think that’s sentimental, but I mean it—to the bitter end.”

I saw that he had decided not to come, for some reason of his own. So I stood up.

“Are you a college man?” he asked suddenly.

For a moment I thought he was going to suggest a “gonnegtion.” But he only nodded and shook my hand.

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead,” he said. “After that my own rule is to let everything alone.”

When I left his office, the sky had turned dark. I got back to West Egg in a drizzle. I changed my clothes and went next door. I found Mr. Gatz walking up and down excitedly in the hall. His pride in his son and in his son’s things was growing all the time. And now he had something to show me.

“Jimmy sent me this picture.” He took out his wallet with shaking fingers. “Look there.”

It was a photograph of the house. It was cracked at the corners and dirty from many hands. He eagerly showed me every detail. “Look there!” Then he looked into my eyes for admiration. He had shown it so often that I think it was more real to him now than the house itself.

“Jimmy sent it to me. I think it’s a very pretty picture. It shows up well.”

“Very well. Had you seen him lately?”

“He come out to see me two years ago and bought me the house I live in now. Of course we was broke up when he run off from home, but I see now there was a reason for it. He knew he had a big future in front of him. And ever since he made a success he was very generous with me.”

He didn’t seem to want to put the picture away. He held it in front of my eyes for another minute, slowly. Then he put the wallet back. From his pocket he pulled a ragged old copy of a book called *Hopalong Cassidy*.

“Look here, this is a book he had when he was a boy. It just shows you.”

He opened it at the back cover and turned it around for me to see. On the last flyleaf the word **schedule** was printed, with the date September 12, 1906. And underneath:

General Resolves

- No wasting time at Shafters or \[a name, indecipherable\]

- No more smokeing or chewing.

- Bath every other day

- Read one improving book or magazine per week

- Save $5.00 \[crossed out\] $3.00 per week

- Be better to parents

“I came across this book by accident,” said the old man. “It just shows you, don’t it?”

“It just shows you.”

“Jimmy was bound to get ahead. He always had some resolves like this or something. Do you notice what he’s got about improving his mind? He was always great for that. He told me I et like a hog once, and I beat him for it.”

He didn’t want to close the book. He read each item aloud and then looked at me eagerly. I think he almost expected me to copy the list for my own use.

A little before three the Lutheran minister arrived from Flushing. Without wanting to, I began to look out of the windows for other cars. So did Gatsby’s father. Time passed, and the servants came in and stood waiting in the hall. His eyes began to blink anxiously. He spoke about the rain in a worried, uncertain way. The minister looked at his watch several times. So I took him aside and asked him to wait for half an hour. But it wasn’t any use. Nobody came.

About five o’clock our line of three cars reached the cemetery. It stopped beside the gate in a thick drizzle. First came a motor hearse, horribly black and wet. Then came Mr. Gatz and the minister and I in the limousine. A little later four or five servants and the postman from West Egg arrived in Gatsby’s station wagon. They were all wet to the skin. As we started through the gate into the cemetery, I heard a car stop. Then I heard someone splashing after us over the wet, soft ground. I looked around. It was Owl Eyes, the man with the glasses like an owl’s eyes. Three months before, I had found him in the library one night, amazed at Gatsby’s books.

I had never seen him since then. I don’t know how he knew about the funeral. I don’t even know his name. The rain poured down his thick glasses. He took them off and wiped them, so that he could see. Men were rolling back the canvas that covered Gatsby’s grave.

I tried to think about Gatsby then for a moment. But he was already too far away. I could only remember that Daisy hadn’t sent a message or a flower. I remembered it without anger. Dimly I heard someone murmur, “Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on.” And then Owl Eyes said “Amen to that,” in a brave voice.

We hurried back through the rain to the cars, in ones and twos. Owl Eyes spoke to me by the gate.

“I couldn’t get to the house,” he said.

“Neither could anybody else.”

“Go on!” He was shocked. “Why, my God! they used to go there by the hundreds.”

He took off his glasses and wiped them again, outside and in.

“The poor son-of-a-bitch,” he said.

One of my clearest memories is of coming back West at Christmas time. First I came from my private school, and later from college. Some of us were going farther than Chicago. We met in the old, dark Union Station at six o’clock on a December evening. A few Chicago friends came too, to say a quick goodbye. They were already busy with their own holiday fun. I remember the fur coats of the girls coming home from Miss This-or-That’s school. I remember the chatter and the frozen breath. I remember the hands waving above our heads as we saw old friends. And I remember the comparing of invitations: “Are you going to the Ordways’? the Herseys’? the Schultzes’?” We held the long green tickets tight in our gloved hands. And last there were the dark yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad. They stood on the tracks beside the gate, looking as cheerful as Christmas itself.

We pulled out into the winter night. The real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and shine against the windows. The weak lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by. Then suddenly there was a sharp, wild freshness in the air. We breathed it in deeply as we walked back from dinner through the cold spaces between the cars. For one strange hour we felt, more strongly than words can say, that we belonged to this country. Then we melted into it again, and became part of it.

That’s my Middle West. It isn’t the wheat or the prairies or the lonely Swedish towns. It is the exciting trains of my youth that brought us home. It is the street lamps and the sleigh bells in the frosty dark. It is the shadows of holly wreaths that lighted windows threw on the snow. I am part of that. I am a little serious because of those long winters. I am a little too pleased with myself, because I grew up in the Carraway house. In my city, people still call houses by a family’s name for many years. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all. Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I were all Westerners. Perhaps we all had some weakness in common. Perhaps it made us unable, in a quiet way, to fit into Eastern life.

Even when the East excited me most, it always seemed a little twisted to me. That was true even when I felt most clearly that it was better than the towns beyond the Ohio. Those towns were bored, spread out and too big. People there were always asking questions about everyone’s life, except for the children and the very old. West Egg, especially, still appears in my stranger dreams. I see it as a night scene painted by El Greco. There are a hundred houses, ordinary and frightening at the same time. They are crouching under a dark, heavy sky and a dull moon. In the front of the picture, four serious men in evening suits are walking along the sidewalk. They are carrying a stretcher. On it lies a drunk woman in a white evening dress. Her hand hangs over the side and sparkles coldly with jewels. Seriously, the men turn in at a house. It is the wrong house. But no one knows the woman’s name, and no one cares.

After Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for me like that. It was twisted, and my eyes couldn’t make it straight again. The blue smoke of dry, burning leaves was in the air. The wind blew the wet washing stiff on the line. Then I decided to come back home.

There was one thing to do before I left. It was an awkward, unpleasant thing, and perhaps it would have been better to leave it alone. But I wanted to leave things in order. I didn’t want to trust that helpful, uncaring sea to wash my rubbish away. I saw Jordan Baker. We talked about what had happened between us, and what had happened to me afterward. Sometimes we talked about it directly and sometimes around it. She lay perfectly still in a big chair, listening.

She was dressed to play golf. I remember thinking that she looked like a good picture in a magazine. Her chin was raised a little proudly. Her hair was the colour of an autumn leaf. Her face was the same brown as the fingerless glove on her knee. When I had finished, she told me without comment that she was engaged to another man. I didn’t really believe it, although there were several men she could have married if she only nodded her head. But I pretended to be surprised. For just a minute I wondered if I was making a mistake. Then I quickly thought it all over again and got up to say goodbye.

“Nevertheless you did throw me over,” said Jordan suddenly. “You threw me over on the telephone. I don’t give a damn about you now, but it was a new experience for me, and I felt a little dizzy for a while.”

We shook hands.

“Oh, and do you remember”—she added—“a conversation we had once about driving a car?”

“Why—not exactly.”

“You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.”

“I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honour.”

She didn’t answer. I was angry, and half in love with her, and terribly sorry. I turned away.

One afternoon late in October I saw Tom Buchanan. He was walking ahead of me along Fifth Avenue in his quick, aggressive way. His hands were held a little away from his body, as if to push away anything in his path. His head moved sharply here and there, following his restless eyes. I slowed down so that I wouldn’t pass him. Just then he stopped and began frowning into the windows of a jewellery store. Suddenly he saw me. He walked back, holding out his hand.

“What’s the matter, Nick? Do you object to shaking hands with me?”

“Yes. You know what I think of you.”

“You’re crazy, Nick,” he said quickly. “Crazy as hell. I don’t know what’s the matter with you.”

“Tom,” I asked, “what did you say to Wilson that afternoon?”

He stared at me without a word. Then I knew I had guessed right about those missing hours. I started to turn away, but he took a step after me and grabbed my arm.

“I told him the truth,” he said. “He came to the door while we were getting ready to leave. When I sent down word that we weren’t in, he tried to force his way upstairs. He was crazy enough to kill me if I hadn’t told him who owned the car. His hand was on a revolver in his pocket every minute he was in the house—” He stopped and looked at me boldly. “What if I did tell him? That fellow had it coming to him. He threw dust into your eyes just like he did in Daisy’s, but he was a tough one. He ran over Myrtle like you’d run over a dog and never even stopped his car.”

There was nothing I could say. There was only the one fact that I could never say: it wasn’t true.

“And if you think I didn’t have my share of suffering—look here, when I went to give up that flat, I saw that damn box of dog biscuits sitting there on the sideboard. I sat down and cried like a baby. By God it was awful—”

I couldn’t forgive him or like him. But I saw that, to him, what he had done was completely right. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy. They smashed up things and living creatures. Then they went back into their money, or their great carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together. And they let other people clean up the mess they had made…

I shook hands with him. It seemed silly not to, because suddenly I felt as if I were talking to a child. Then he went into the jewellery store to buy a pearl necklace, or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons. He was free forever of my small-town worries about right and wrong.

Gatsby’s house was still empty when I left. The grass on his lawn had grown as long as mine. One of the taxi drivers in the village never drove a passenger past the entrance gate without stopping. He always stopped for a minute and pointed inside. Perhaps it was he who drove Daisy and Gatsby over to East Egg on the night of the accident. Perhaps he had made up a story about it all of his own. I didn’t want to hear it, and I avoided him when I got off the train.

I spent my Saturday nights in New York, because Gatsby’s shining, dazzling parties were still so alive in my mind. I could still hear the music and the laughter from his garden, quiet and never-ending. I could still hear the cars going up and down his drive. One night I did hear a real car there. I saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I didn’t go to see who it was. It was probably some last guest who had been away at the ends of the earth. He didn’t know that the party was over.

On the last night my trunk was packed and my car was sold to the grocer. I went over and looked once more at that huge, confused failure of a house. On the white steps some boy had written a dirty word with a piece of brick. It stood out clearly in the moonlight. I rubbed it out, dragging my shoe noisily along the stone. Then I wandered down to the beach and lay down on the sand with my arms and legs stretched out.

Most of the big houses on the shore were closed now. There were hardly any lights, except the dim, moving light of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher, the unimportant houses began to melt away. Slowly I became aware of the old island here. It had once flowered in front of the eyes of Dutch sailors. It was a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its trees were gone now. They had been cut down to make room for Gatsby’s house. But once they had whispered to the last and greatest of all human dreams. For one short, magic moment, man must have held his breath in front of this continent. He was forced to look at its beauty and think about it, though he neither understood this nor wanted it. For the last time in history, he stood face to face with something as great as his capacity for wonder.

I sat there and thought about the old, unknown world. And I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first saw the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn. His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to catch it. He did not know that it was already behind him. It was somewhere back in that huge darkness beyond the city. It was where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light. He believed in the wild, wonderful future that moves further away from us every year. It escaped us then, but that doesn’t matter. Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further… And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

### Glossary

- **inquest**: an official meeting to find out how someone died
- **coroner**: the official who leads an inquest
- **wire**: a telegram, a short message sent quickly by electric wire
- **bonds**: papers you buy as an investment; here they were stolen or false, and the police knew their numbers
- **ulster**: a long, heavy coat
- **resolves**: decisions or promises to yourself
- **flyleaf**: an empty page at the beginning or end of a book
- **gonnegtion**: Wolfshiem’s way of saying “connection”, a partner for business
- **hearse**: the car that carries a dead body to the cemetery
- **drizzle**: light rain
- **“Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on”**: an old saying that rain at a funeral is a good sign for the dead person
- **careless**: not thinking about the results of what you do
- **borne back**: carried back