In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some
advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told
me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t
had the advantages that you’ve had.”
He didn’t say any more,
but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way,
and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In
consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that
has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the
victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick
to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in
a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly
accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret
griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were
unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile
levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate
revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations
of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them,
are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving
judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid
of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly
suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental
decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission
that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or
the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s
founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt
that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral
attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged
glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives
his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who
represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If
personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then
there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity
to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those
intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles
away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability
which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament”—it
was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness
such as I have never found in any other person and which it is
not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all
right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust
floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out
my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations
of men.
My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle
Western city for three generations.
The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition
that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual
founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here
in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started
the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on to-day.
I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him—with
special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that
hangs in father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just
a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated
in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed
the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead
of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed
like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East
and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond
business, so I supposed it could support one more single man.
All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing
a prep school for me, and finally said, “Why—ye-es,”
with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for
a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought,
in the spring of twenty-two.
The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was
a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and
friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that
we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like
a great idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow
at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him
to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog—at
least I had him for a few days until he ran away—and an
old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast
and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.
It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more
recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.
“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly.
I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a
guide, a pathfinder, an original settler.
He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing
on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar
conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health
to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought
a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities,
and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from
the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas
and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of
reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one
year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials
for the “Yale News”—and now I was going to bring
back all such things into my life and become again that most limited
of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t
just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from
a single window, after all.
It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in
one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that
slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York—and
where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual
formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous
eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay,
jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western
hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. they
are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story, they
are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical
resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls
that fly overhead. to the wingless a more arresting phenomenon
is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.
I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two,
though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and
not a little sinister contrast between them. my house was at the
very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed
between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand
a season. the one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it
was a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy,
with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw
ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of
lawn and garden. It was Gatsby’s mansion. Or, rather, as I didn’t
know Mr. Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of
that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore,
and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial
view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of
millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.
Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East
Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really
begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the
Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I’d
known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days
with them in Chicago.
Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been
one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New
Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach
such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything
afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy—even
in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but
now he’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather
took your breath away: for instance, he’d brought down a string
of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a
man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.
Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France
for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully
wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a
permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe
it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would
drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic
turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.
And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to
East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their
house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white
Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started
at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a
mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally
when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright
vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken
by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and
wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding
clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.
He had changed since his New Haven years.
Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard
mouth and a supercilious manner.
Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face
and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward.
Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide
the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening
boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great
pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin
coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.
His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression
of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt
in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New
Haven who had hated his guts.
“Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final,”
he seemed to say, “just because I’m stronger and more of
a man than you are.” We were in the same senior society,
and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that
he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant
wistfulness of his own.
We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.
“I’ve got a nice place here,” he said, his eyes flashing
about restlessly.
Turning me around by one arm, he moved a broad flat hand along
the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden,
a half acre of deep, pungent roses, and a snub-nosed motor-boat
that bumped the tide offshore.
“It belonged to Demaine, the oil man.” He turned me
around again, politely and abruptly. “We’ll go inside.”
We walked through a high hallway
into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house
by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming
white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little
way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains
in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them
up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled
over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does
on the sea.
The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous
couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an
anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were
rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in
after a short flight around the house.
I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and
snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then
there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the
caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the
rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.
The younger of the two was a stranger to me.
She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely
motionless, and with her chin raised a little, as if she were
balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she
saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it—indeed,
I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having
disturbed her by coming in.
The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she leaned slightly
forward with a conscientious expression—then she laughed, an
absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward
into the room.
“I’m p-paralyzed with happiness.”
She laughed again,
as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment,
looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the
world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted
in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker.
(I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people
lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less
charming.)
At any rate, Miss Baker’s lips fluttered, she nodded
at me almost imperceptibly, and then quickly tipped her head back
again—the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a
little and given her something of a fright. Again a sort of apology
arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self-sufficiency
draws a stunned tribute from me.
I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her
low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows
up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that
will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright
things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there
was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her
found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,”
a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while
since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the
next hour.
I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way
East, and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.
“Do they miss me?” she cried ecstatically.
“The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear
wheel painted black as a mourning wreath, and there’s a persistent
wail all night along the north shore.”
“How gorgeous! Let’s go back, Tom. To-morrow!” Then she added irrelevantly:
“You ought to see the baby.”
“I’d like to.”
“She’s asleep. She’s three years old. Haven’t you ever seen
her?”
“Never.”
“Well, you ought to see her. She’s—”
Tom Buchanan, who had been hovering restlessly
about the room, stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.
“What you doing, Nick?”
“I’m a bond man.”
“Who with?” I told him.
“Never heard of them,” he remarked decisively.
This annoyed me.
“You will,” I answered shortly. “You will if you stay in the East.”
“Oh, I’ll
stay in the East, don’t you worry,” he said, glancing at
Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more.
“I’d be a God damned fool to live anywhere else.”
At this point Miss Baker said:
“Absolutely!” with such
suddenness that I started—it was the first word she uttered
since I came into the room.
Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned
and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.
“I’m stiff,” she complained,
“I’ve been lying
on that sofa for as long as I can remember.”
“Don’t
look at me,” Daisy retorted.
“I’ve been trying to get
you to New York all afternoon.”
“No, thanks,”
said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry,
“I’m absolutely in training.”
Her host looked at her incredulously.
“You are!” He took down his drink as if it were a drop
in the bottom of a glass.
“How you ever get anything done is beyond me.”
I looked at Miss Baker, wondering what it was she
“got done.”
I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl,
with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by throwing her
body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet.
Her gray sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal
curiosity out of a wan, charming, discontented face. It occurred
to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere
before.
“You live in West Egg,” she remarked
contemptuously.
“I know somebody there.”
“I don’t know a single—”
“You must know Gatsby.”
“Gatsby?” demanded Daisy. “What Gatsby?”
Before I could reply that he was my
neighbor dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively
under mine, Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though
he were moving a checker to another square.
Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips, the
two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch, open
toward the sunset, where four candles flickered on the table in
the diminished wind.
“Why candles?” objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped
them out with her fingers.
“In two weeks it’ll be the longest day in the year.”
She looked at us all radiantly.
“Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and
then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and
then miss it.”
“We ought to plan something,”
yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting
into bed.
“All right,” said Daisy. “What’ll we plan?”
She turned to me helplessly: “What do people plan?”
Before I could answer her eyes fastened
with an awed expression on her little finger.
“Look!” she complained. “I hurt it.”
We all looked—the knuckle was black and blue.
“You did it, Tom,” she said accusingly.
“I know you didn’t mean to, but you did do it. That’s what
I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great, big, hulking physical
specimen of a—”
“I hate that word hulking,” objected Tom crossly,
“even in kidding.”
“Hulking,” insisted Daisy.
Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and
with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that
was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in
the absence of all desire. They were here, and they accepted Tom
and me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to
be entertained. They knew that presently dinner would be over
and a little later the evening too would be over and casually
put away. It was sharply different from the West, where an evening
was hurried from phase to phase toward its close, in a continually
disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the
moment itself.
“You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy,” I confessed
on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret.
“Can’t you talk about crops or something?”
I meant
nothing in particular by this remark, but it was taken up in an
unexpected way.
“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently.
“I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have
you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?”
“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.
“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it.
The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will
be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an
expression of unthoughtful sadness.
“He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that
word we—”
“Well, these books are all scientific,”
insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently.
“This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us,
who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will
have control of things.”
“We’ve got to beat them down,”
whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.
“You ought to live in California—” began Miss Baker,
but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.
“This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and
you are, and—” After an infinitesimal hesitation he included
Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again.
“—And we’ve produced all the things that go to make
civilization—oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?”
There
was something pathetic in his concentration, as if his complacency,
more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more. When,
almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left
the porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned
toward me.
“I’ll tell you a family secret,” she whispered enthusiastically.
“It’s about the butler’s nose. Do you want to hear about
the butler’s nose?”
“That’s why I came over to-night.”
“Well, he wasn’t always a butler; he used to be the silver
polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service
for two hundred people. He had to polish it from morning till
night, until finally it began to affect his nose—”
“Things went from bad to worse,” suggested Miss Baker.
“Yes. Things went from bad to worse, until finally he had
to give up his position.”
For a moment the last sunshine
fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice
compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened—then the glow
faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children
leaving a pleasant street at dusk.
The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom’s ear,
whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair, and without a word
went inside.
As if his absence quickened something within her, Daisy leaned
forward again, her voice glowing and singing.
“I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a—of
a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn’t he?” She turned to
Miss Baker for confirmation. “An absolute rose?”
This
was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only extemporizing,
but a stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying
to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling
words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and excused
herself and went into the house.
Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of
meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said
“Sh!” in a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur
was audible in the room beyond, and Miss Baker leaned forward
unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of
coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether.
“This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbor—” I
said.
“Don’t talk. I want to hear what happens.”
“Is something happening?” I inquired innocently.
“You mean to say you don’t know?” said Miss Baker,
honestly surprised.
“I thought everybody knew.”
“I don’t.”
“Why—” she said hesitantly,
“Tom’s got some woman in
New York.”
“Got some woman?” I repeated blankly.
Miss Baker nodded.
“She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner
time. Don’t you think?”
Almost before I had grasped her
meaning there was the flutter of a dress and the crunch of leather
boots, and Tom and Daisy were back at the table.
“It couldn’t be helped!” cried Daisy with tense gayety.
She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me,
and continued, “I looked outdoors for a minute, and it’s
very romantic outdoors.
There’s a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale
come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He’s singing away—”
Her voice sang: “It’s romantic, isn’t it, Tom?”
“Very romantic,” he said, and then miserably to me:
“If it’s light enough after dinner, I want to take you down
to the stables.”
The telephone rang inside, startlingly,
and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom the subject of the
stables, in fact all subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken
fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles
being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to
look squarely at every one, and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn’t
guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking, but I doubt if even Miss
Baker, who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy scepticism,
was able utterly to put this fifth guest’s shrill metallic urgency
out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation might have
seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone immediately
for the police.
The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and
Miss Baker, with several feet of twilight between them, strolled
back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible
body, while, trying to look pleasantly interested and a little
deaf, I followed Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to
the porch in front. In its deep gloom we sat down side by side
on a wicker settee.
Daisy took her face in her hands as if feeling its lovely shape,
and her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that
turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would
be some sedative questions about her little girl.
“We don’t know each other very well, Nick,” she said
suddenly.
“Even if we are cousins. You didn’t come to my wedding.”
“I wasn’t back from the war.”
“That’s true.” She hesitated.
“Well, I’ve had a very bad time, Nick, and I’m pretty cynical
about everything.”
Evidently she had reason to be. I waited
but she didn’t say any more, and after a moment I returned rather
feebly to the subject of her daughter.
“I suppose she talks, and—eats, and everything.”
“Oh, yes.” She looked at me absently.
“Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born.
Would you like to hear?”
“Very much.”
“It’ll
show you how I’ve gotten to feel about—things.
Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where.
I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling,
and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She
told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept.
‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll
be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world,
a beautiful little fool.’
“You see I think everything’s terrible
anyhow,” she went on in a convinced way.
“Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people. And I know.
I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.”
Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom’s,
and she laughed with thrilling scorn.
“Sophisticated—God, I’m sophisticated!”
The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief,
I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me
uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort
to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough,
in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely
face, as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished
secret society to which she and Tom belonged.
Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light.
Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the long couch and she
read aloud to him from the “Saturday Evening Post”—the
words, murmurous and uninflected, running together in a
soothing tune. The lamp-light, bright on his boots and dull on
the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as
she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms.
When we came in she held us silent for a moment with a lifted
hand.
“To be continued,” she said, tossing the magazine on
the table, “in our very next issue.”
Her body asserted
itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she stood up.
“Ten o’clock,” she remarked, apparently finding the
time on the ceiling. “Time for this good girl to go to bed.”
“Jordan’s going to play in the tournament to-morrow,” explained Daisy,
“over at Westchester.”
“Oh—you’re Jordan Baker.”
I knew now why her face was familiar—its pleasing contemptuous
expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures
of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach.
I had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story,
but what it was I had forgotten long ago.
“Good night,” she said softly. “Wake me at eight, won’t you.”
“If you’ll get up.”
“I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon.”
“Of course you will,” confirmed Daisy.
“In fact I think I’ll arrange a marriage. Come over often,
Nick, and I’ll sort of—oh—fling you together. You know—lock
you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in
a boat, and all that sort of thing—”
“Good night,” called Miss Baker from the stairs.
“I haven’t heard a word.”
“She’s a nice girl,” said Tom after a moment.
“They oughtn’t to let her run around the country this way.”
“Who oughtn’t to?” inquired Daisy coldly.
“Her family.”
“Her family is one aunt about a
thousand years old. Besides, Nick’s going to look after her, aren’t
you, Nick? She’s going to spend lots of week-ends out here this
summer. I think the home influence will be very good for her.”
Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment in silence.
“Is she from New York?” I asked quickly.
“From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together
there. Our beautiful white—”
“Did you give Nick
a little heart to heart talk on the veranda?” demanded Tom
suddenly.
“Did I?” She looked at me.
“I can’t seem to remember, but I think we talked about the
Nordic race. Yes, I’m sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and
first thing you know—”
“Don’t believe everything you hear, Nick,” he advised me.
I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes
later I got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood
side by side in a cheerful square of light. As I started my motor
Daisy peremptorily called: “Wait!
“I forgot to ask you something, and it’s important.
We heard you were engaged to a girl out West.”
“That’s right,” corroborated Tom kindly.
“We heard that you were engaged.”
“It’s libel. I’m too poor.”
“But we heard it,” insisted Daisy,
surprising me by opening up again in a flower-like way.
“We heard it from three people, so it must be true.”
Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn’t even
vaguely engaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns
was one of the reasons I had come East. You can’t stop going with
an old friend on account of rumors, and on the other hand I had
no intention of being rumored into marriage.
Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely
rich—nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove
away. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush
out of the house, child in arms—but apparently there were no
such intentions in her head. As for Tom, the fact that he “had
some woman in New York” was really less surprising than
that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him
nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism
no longer nourished his peremptory heart.
Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of
wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light,
and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its
shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard.
The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings
beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full
bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette
of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and turning my head
to watch it, I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure
had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor’s mansion and was standing
with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the
stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position
of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself,
come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.
I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner,
and that would do for an introduction.
But I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that
he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward
the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I
could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and
distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute
and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked
once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in
the unquiet darkness
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