ABOUT half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily
joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile,
so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This
is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like
wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes
take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally,
with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already
crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray
cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak,
and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with
leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens
their obscure operations from your sight.
But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift
endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor
T. J. Eckleburg.
The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their
irises are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead,
from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent
nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to
fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down
himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away.
But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun
and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river,
and, when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers
on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as
half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute,
and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress.
The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known.
His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular
restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about,
chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see
her, I had no desire to meet her—but I did. I went up to New
York with Tom on the train one afternoon, and when we stopped
by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and, taking hold of my elbow,
literally forced me from the car.
“We’re getting off,” he insisted.
“I want you to meet my girl.”
I think he’d tanked up
a good deal at luncheon, and his determination to have my company
bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on
Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do.
I followed him over a low whitewashed railroad fence, and we walked
back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent
stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow
brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact
Main Street ministering to it, and contiguous to absolutely nothing.
One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was
an all-night restaurant, approached by a trail of ashes; the third
was a garage—repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars bought and sold.
—and I followed Tom inside.
The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was
the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner.
It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind,
and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead,
when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office,
wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blond, spiritless
man, anaemic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam
of hope sprang into his light blue eyes.
“Hello, Wilson, old man,” said Tom, slapping him jovially
on the shoulder. “How’s business?”
“I can’t complain,” answered
Wilson unconvincingly.
“When are you going to sell me that car?”
“Next
week; I’ve got my man working on it now.”
“Works pretty slow, don’t he?”
“No, he doesn’t,” said Tom coldly.
“And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell
it somewhere else after all.”
“I don’t mean that,” explained Wilson quickly.
“I just meant—”
His voice faded off and Tom glanced
impatiently around the garage. Then I heard footsteps on a stairs,
and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the
light from the office door.
She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried
her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can.
Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crépe-de-chine, contained
no facet or gleam of beauty, but there was an immediately perceptible
vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually
smouldering. She smiled slowly and, walking through her husband
as if he were a ghost, shook hands with Tom, looking him flush
in the eye.
Then she wet her lips, and without turning around spoke to her
husband in a soft, coarse voice:
“Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.”
“Oh, sure,” agreed
Wilson hurriedly, and went toward the little office, mingling
immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen
dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything
in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom.
“I want to see you,” said Tom intently.
“Get on the next train.”
“All right.”
“I’ll
meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.” She nodded
and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two
chairs from his office door.
We waited for her down the road and out of sight.
It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a gray, scrawny
Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row along the railroad
track.
“Terrible place, isn’t it,” said Tom, exchanging a
frown with Doctor Eckleburg.
“Awful.”
“It does her good to get away.”
“Doesn’t her husband object?”
“Wilson? He thinks
she goes to see her sister in New York. He’s so dumb he doesn’t
know he’s alive.”
So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went
up together to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs.
Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that much to
the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train.
She had changed her dress to a brown figured muslin, which stretched
tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform
in New York. At the news-stand she bought a copy of “Town
Tattle” and a moving-picture magazine, and in the station
drug-store some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Up-stairs,
in the solemn echoing drive she let four taxicabs drive away before
she selected a new one, lavender-colored with gray upholstery,
and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the
glowing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the
window and, leaning forward, tapped on the front glass.
“I want to get one of those dogs,” she said earnestly.
“I want to get one for the apartment. They’re nice to have—a
dog.”
We backed up to a gray old man who bore an absurd
resemblance to John D. Rockefeller. In a basket swung from his
neck cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an indeterminate breed.
“What kind are they?” asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly, as
he came to the taxi-window.
“All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?”
“I’d
like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got
that kind?”
The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged
in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck.
“That’s no police dog,” said Tom.
“No, it’s not exactly a police dog,” said the man with
disappointment in his voice.
“It’s more of an Airedale.” He passed his hand over
the brown wash-rag of a back.
“Look at that coat. Some coat.
That’s a dog that’ll never bother you with catching cold.”
“I think it’s cute,” said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically.
“How much is it?”
“That dog?” He looked at it admiringly.
“That dog will cost you ten dollars.”
The Airedale—undoubtedly
there was an Airedale concerned in it somewhere,
though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled
down into Mrs. Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the weather-proof
coat with rapture.
“Is it a boy or a girl?” she asked delicately.
“That dog? That dog’s a boy.”
“It’s a bitch,” said Tom decisively.
“Here’s your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it.”
We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral,
on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn’t have been surprised
to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner.
“Hold on,” I said, “I have to leave you here.”
“No, you don’t,” interposed Tom quickly.
“Myrtle’ll be hurt if you don’t come up to the apartment.
Won’t you, Myrtle?” “Come on,” she urged.
“I’ll telephone my sister Catherine. She’s said to be very
beautiful by people who ought to know.”
“Well, I’d like to, but—”
We went on, cutting back again over the
Park toward the West Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab stopped
at one slice in a long white cake of apartment-houses. Throwing
a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs. Wilson
gathered up her dog and her other purchases, and went haughtily
in.
“I’m going to have the McKees come up,” she announced
as we rose in the elevator.
“And, of course, I got to call up my sister, too.”
The apartment was on the top floor—a small living-room, a small
dining-room, a small bedroom, and a bath. The living-room was
crowded to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely
too large for it, so that to move about was to stumble continually
over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The
only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen
sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance, however,
the hen resolved itself into a bonnet, and the countenance of
a stout old lady beamed down into the room. Several old copies
of “Town Tattle” lay on the table together with a copy
of “Simon Called Peter,” and some of the small scandal
magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the
dog. A reluctant elevator-boy went for a box full of straw and
some milk, to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large,
hard dog-biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically in the
saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle
of whiskey from a locked bureau door.
I have been drunk just twice in my life, and the second time was
that afternoon; so everything that happened has a dim, hazy cast
over it, although until after eight o’clock the apartment was
full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs. Wilson called
up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes,
and I went out to buy some at the drugstore on the corner. When
I came back they had disappeared, so I sat down discreetly in the
living-room and read a chapter of “Simon Called Peter”—either
it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things,
because it didn’t make any sense to me.
Just as Tom and Myrtle (after the first drink Mrs. Wilson and
I called each other by our first names) reappeared, company commenced
to arrive at the apartment-door.
The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty,
with a solid, sticky bob of red hair, and a complexion powdered
milky white. Her eye-brows had been plucked and then drawn on
again at a more rakish angle, but the efforts of nature toward
the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her
face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as
innumerable pottery bracelets jingled up and down upon her arms.
She came in with such a proprietary haste, and looked around so
possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here.
But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question
aloud, and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel.
Mr. McKee was a pale, feminine man from the flat below. He had
just shaved, for there was a white spot of lather on his cheekbone,
and he was most respectful in his greeting to every one in the
room. He informed me that he was in the “artistic game,”
and I gathered later that he was a photographer and had made the
dim enlargement of Mrs.
Wilson’s mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall. His
wife was shrill, languid, handsome, and horrible. She told me
with pride that her husband had photographed her a hundred and
twenty-seven times since they had been married.
Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time before, and was
now attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream-colored chiffon,
which gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room.
With the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone
a change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in
the garage was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter,
her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment
by moment, and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her,
until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through
the smoky air.
“My dear,” she told her sister in a high, mincing 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, and 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,” remarked Mrs. McKee,
“I think it’s adorable.”
Mrs. Wilson rejected the compliment by raising her eyebrow in disdain.
“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,” pursued Mrs. McKee.
“If Chester could only get you in that pose I think he could
make something of it.”
We all looked in silence at Mrs.
Wilson, who removed a strand of hair from over her eyes and looked
back at us with a brilliant smile. Mr. McKee regarded her intently
with his head on one side, and then moved his hand back and forth
slowly 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, whereupon Tom Buchanan
yawned audibly 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 the shiftlessness of
the lower orders. “These people! You have to keep after them all the time.”
She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over
to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy, and swept into the kitchen,
implying that a dozen chefs awaited her orders there.
“I’ve done some nice things out on Long Island,” asserted
Mr. McKee.
Tom looked at him blankly.
“Two of them we have framed down-stairs.”
“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 inquired.
“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 absorbing information about my neighbor was interrupted
by Mrs. McKee’s pointing suddenly at Catherine:
“Chester,
I think you could do something with her,” she broke out,
but Mr. McKee only nodded in a bored way, and turned his attention
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, breaking into a short shout
of laughter as Mrs. Wilson entered with a tray.
“She’ll give you a letter of introduction, won’t you Myrtle?”
“Do what?” she asked, startled.
“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.
“ ‘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
overheard the question, and it was violent and obscene.
“You see,” cried Catherine triumphantly. 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, and I was a little shocked at the elaborateness
of the lie.
“When they do get married,” continued Catherine, “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 exclaimed surprisingly.
“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 gypped 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!”
The late afternoon sky bloomed
in the window for a moment 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 declared vigorously.
“I almost married a little kyke 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, ambiguously.
“And that’s the difference between your case and mine.”
“Why did you, Myrtle?” demanded Catherine.
“Nobody forced you to.”
Myrtle considered.
“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 incredulously.
“Who said I was crazy about him? I never was any more crazy
about him than I was about that man there.”
She pointed
suddenly at me, and every one looked at me accusingly. I tried
to show by my expression that I had played no part in her past.
“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.” She looked around
to see who was listening. “ ‘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 to beat the band all afternoon.”
“She really ought to get away from him,” resumed Catherine
to me. “They’ve been living over that garage for eleven years. And
Tom’s the first sweetie she ever had.”
The bottle of whiskey—a second one—was now in constant demand by
all present, excepting Catherine, who “felt just as good on nothing at all.”
Tom rang for the janitor and sent him for some celebrated sandwiches,
which were a complete supper in themselves. I wanted to get out
and walk southward toward the park through the soft twilight,
but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident
argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair.
Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed
their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening
streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within
and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible
variety of life.
Myrtle pulled her chair close to mine, and suddenly her warm breath
poured over 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
shirt-front pressed against my arm, and 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 full of her artificial
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 to-morrow. 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 ash-trays 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
afterward I looked at my watch and found it was ten.
Mr. McKee was asleep on a chair with his fists clenched in his
lap, like a photograph of a man of action. Taking out my handkerchief
I wiped from his cheek the remains of the spot of dried lather
that had worried me all the afternoon.
The little dog was sitting on the table looking with blind eyes
through the smoke, and from time to time groaning faintly. People
disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then
lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few
feet away. Some time toward midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson
stood face to face discussing, in impassioned voices, whether
Mrs. Wilson had any right to mention Daisy’s name.
“Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!” shouted Mrs. Wilson.
“I’ll say it whenever I want to! Daisy! Dai—”
Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open
hand.
Then there were bloody towels upon the bath-room floor, and women’s
voices scolding, and high over the confusion a long broken wail
of pain. Mr. McKee awoke from his doze and started in a daze toward the
door. When he had gone half way he turned around and stared at
the scene—his wife and Catherine scolding and consoling as they
stumbled here and there among the crowded furniture with articles
of aid, and the despairing figure on the couch, bleeding fluently,
and trying to spread a copy of “Town Tattle” over the
tapestry scenes of Versailles.
Then Mr. McKee turned and continued on out the door. Taking my
hat from the chandelier, I followed.
“Come to lunch some day,” he suggested, as we groaned
down in the elevator.
“Where?”
“Anywhere.”
“Keep your hands off the lever,” snapped the elevator boy.
“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, clad in his
underwear, with 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, staring
at the morning Tribune, and waiting for the four o’clock train.
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