ABOUT this time an ambitious young reporter from New York arrived
one morning at Gatsby’s door and asked him if he had anything
to say.
“Anything to say about what?” inquired Gatsby politely.
“Why—any statement to give out.”
It transpired after
a confused five minutes that the man had heard Gatsby’s name around
his office in a connection which he either wouldn’t reveal or
didn’t fully understand. This was his day off and with laudable
initiative he had hurried out “to see.”
It was a random
shot, and yet the reporter’s instinct was right. Gatsby’s notoriety,
spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his hospitality
and so become authorities on his past, had increased all summer
until he fell just short of being news. Contemporary legends such
as the “underground pipe-line to Canada” attached themselves
to him, and there was one persistent story that he didn’t live
in a house at all, but in a boat that looked like a house and
was moved secretly up and down the Long Island shore. Just why
these inventions were a source of satisfaction to James Gatz of
North Dakota, isn’t easy to say.
James Gatz—that was really, or at least legally, his name. He
had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment
that witnessed the beginning of his career—when he saw Dan Cody’s
yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior.
It was James Gatz who had been loafing along the beach that afternoon
in a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas pants, but it was
already Jay Gatsby who borrowed a rowboat, pulled out to the Tuolomee,
and informed Cody that a wind might catch him and break him up
in half an hour.
I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then.
His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people—his
imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all.
The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang
from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a
phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he
must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar,
and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby
that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to
this conception he was faithful to the end.
For over a year he had been beating his way along the south shore
of Lake Superior as a clam-digger and a salmon-fisher or in any
other capacity that brought him food and bed. His brown, hardening
body lived naturally through the half-fierce, half-lazy work of
the bracing days. He knew women early, and since they spoiled
him he became contemptuous of them, of young virgins because they
were ignorant, of the others because they were hysterical about
things which in his overwhelming self-absorbtion he took for granted.
But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot.
The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed
at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in
his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon
soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each
night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness
closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For
a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination;
they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise
that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.
An instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months before,
to the small Lutheran college of St. Olaf in southern MinnesotA.
He stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference
to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising
the janitor’s work with which he was to pay his way through. Then
he drifted back to Lake Superior, and he was still searching for
something to do on the day that Dan Cody’s yacht dropped anchor
in the shallows alongshore.
Cody was fifty years old then, a product of the Nevada silver
fields, of the Yukon, of every rush for metal since seventy-five.
The transactions in Montana copper that made him many times a
millionaire found him physically robust but on the verge of soft-mindedness,
and, suspecting this, an infinite number of women tried to separate
him from his money.
The none too savory ramifications by which Ella Kaye, the newspaper
woman, played Madame de Maintenon to his weakness and sent him
to sea in a yacht, were common knowledge to the turgid sub-journalism
of 1902. He had been coasting along all too hospitable shores
for five years when he turned up as James Gatz’s destiny at Little
Girls Point.
To the young Gatz, resting on his oars and looking up at the railed
deck, the yacht represented all the beauty and glamour in the
world. I suppose he smiled at Cody—he had probably discovered
that people liked him when he smiled. At any rate Cody asked him
a few questions (one of them elicited the brand new name) and
found that he was quick and extravagantly ambitious. A few days
later he took him to Duluth and bought him a blue coat, six pair
of white duck trousers, and a yachting cap.
And when the Tuolomee left for the West Indies and the
Barbary Coast Gatsby left too.
He was employed in a vague personal capacity—while he remained
with Cody he was in turn steward, mate, skipper, secretary, and
even jailor, for Dan Cody sober knew what lavish doings Dan Cody
drunk might soon be about, and he provided for such contingencies
by reposing more and more trust in Gatsby. The arrangement lasted
five years, during which the boat went three times around the
Continent.
It might have lasted indefinitely except for the fact that Ella
Kaye came on board one night in Boston and a week later Dan Cody
inhospitably died.
I remember the portrait of him up in Gatsby’s bedroom, a gray,
florid man with a hard, empty face—the pioneer debauchee, who
during one phase of American life brought back to the Eastern
seaboard the savage violence of the frontier brothel and saloon.
It was indirectly due to Cody that Gatsby drank so little. Sometimes
in the course of gay parties women used to rub champagne into
his hair; for himself he formed the habit of letting liquor alone.
And it was from Cody that he inherited money—a legacy of twenty-five
thousand dollars. He didn’t get it. He never understood the legal
device that was used against him, but what remained of the millions
went intact to Ella Kaye. He was left with his singularly appropriate
education; the vague contour of Jay Gatsby had filled out to the
substantiality of a man.
He told me all this very much later, but I’ve put it down here
with the idea of exploding those first wild rumors about his antecedents,
which weren’t even faintly true. Moreover he told it to me at
a time of confusion, when I had reached the point of believing
everything and nothing about him. So I take advantage of this
short halt, while Gatsby, so to speak, caught his breath, to clear
this set of misconceptions away.
It was a halt, too, in my association with his affairs.
For several weeks I didn’t see him or hear his voice on the phone—mostly
I was in New York, trotting around with Jordan and trying
to ingratiate myself with her senile aunt—but finally I went
over to his house one Sunday afternoon. I hadn’t been there two
minutes when somebody brought Tom Buchanan in for a drink. I was
startled, naturally, but the really surprising thing was that
it hadn’t happened before.
They were a party of three on horseback—Tom and a man named
Sloane and a pretty woman in a brown riding-habit, who had been
there previously.
“I’m delighted to see you,” said Gatsby, standing on
his porch.
“I’m delighted that you dropped in.”
As though they cared!
“Sit right down. Have a cigarette or a cigar.”
He walked around the room quickly, ringing bells. “I’ll
have something to drink for you in just a minute.”
He was profoundly affected by the fact that Tom was there. But
he would be uneasy anyhow until he had given them something, realizing
in a vague way that that was all they came for. Mr. Sloane wanted
nothing. A lemonade? No, thanks. A little champagne? Nothing at
all, thanks. . . . I’m sorry—
“Did you have a nice ride?”
“Very good roads around here.”
“I suppose the automobiles—”
“Yeah.”
Moved by an irresistible
impulse, Gatsby turned to Tom, who had accepted the introduction
as a stranger.
“I believe we’ve met somewhere before, Mr. Buchanan.”
“Oh, yes,” said Tom, gruffly polite, but obviously not remembering.
“So we did. I remember very well.”
“About two weeks ago.”
“That’s right. You were with Nick here.”
“I know your wife,” continued Gatsby, almost aggressively.
“That so?”
Tom turned to me.
“You live near here, Nick?”
“Next door.”
“That so?”
Mr. Sloane didn’t enter into the conversation,
but lounged back haughtily in his chair; the woman said nothing
either—until unexpectedly, after two highballs, she became cordial.
“We’ll all come over to your next party, Mr. Gatsby,” she suggested.
“What do you say?”
“Certainly; I’d be delighted to have you.”
“Be ver’ nice,” said Mr. Sloane, without gratitude.
“Well—think ought to be starting home.”
“Please don’t hurry,” Gatsby urged them. He had control of himself
now, and he wanted to see more of Tom. “Why don’t you—why don’t
you stay for supper? I wouldn’t be surprised if some other people dropped in
from New York.”
“You come to supper with me,” said the lady enthusiastically.
“Both of you.”
This included me. Mr. Sloane got to his feet.
“Come along,” he said—but to her only.
“I mean it,” she insisted. “I’d love to have you.
Lots of room.”
Gatsby looked at me questioningly. He wanted
to go, and he didn’t see that Mr. Sloane had determined he shouldn’t.
“I’m afraid I won’t be able to,” I said.
“Well, you come,” she urged, concentrating on Gatsby.
Mr. Sloane murmured something close to her ear.
“We won’t be late if we start now,” she insisted aloud.
“I haven’t got a horse,” said Gatsby.
“I used to ride in the army, but I’ve never bought a horse.
I’ll have to follow you in my car. Excuse me for just a minute.”
The rest of us walked out on the porch, where Sloane and the lady
began an impassioned conversation aside.
“My God, I believe the man’s coming,” said Tom.
“Doesn’t he know she doesn’t want him?”
“She says she does want him.”
“She has a big dinner party and he won’t know a soul there.” He frowned.
“I wonder where in the devil he met Daisy. By God, I may
be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these
days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.”
Suddenly Mr. Sloane and the lady walked down the steps and mounted their
horses.
“Come on,” said Mr. Sloane to Tom, “we’re late.
We’ve got to go.” And then to me:
“Tell him we couldn’t wait, will you?”
Tom and I shook hands, the rest of us exchanged
a cool nod, and they trotted quickly down the drive, disappearing
under the August foliage just as Gatsby, with hat and light overcoat
in hand, came out the front door.
Tom was evidently perturbed at Daisy’s running around alone, for
on the following Saturday night he came with her to Gatsby’s party.
Perhaps his presence gave the evening its peculiar quality of
oppressiveness—it stands out in my memory from Gatsby’s other
parties that summer. There were the same people, or at least the
same sort of people, the same profusion of champagne, the same
many-colored, many-keyed commotion, but I felt an unpleasantness
in the air, a pervading harshness that hadn’t been there before.
Or perhaps I had merely grown used to it, grown to accept West
Egg as a world complete in itself, with its own standards and
its own great figures, second to nothing because it had no consciousness
of being so, and now I was looking at it again, through Daisy’s
eyes. It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things
upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.
They arrived at twilight, and, as we strolled out among the sparkling
hundreds, Daisy’s voice was playing murmurous tricks in her throat.
“These things excite me so,” she whispered.
“If you want to kiss me any time during the evening, Nick,
just let me know and I’ll be glad to arrange it for you. Just
mention my name. Or present a green card. I’m giving out green—”
“Look around,” suggested Gatsby.
“I’m looking around. I’m having a marvelous—”
“You
must see the faces of many people you’ve heard about.”
Tom’s arrogant eyes roamed the crowd.
“We don’t go around very much,” he said.
“In fact, I was just thinking I don’t know a soul here.”
“Perhaps you know that lady.” Gatsby indicated a gorgeous,
scarcely human orchid of a woman who sat in state under a white
plum tree. Tom and Daisy stared, with that peculiarly unreal feeling
that accompanies the recognition of a hitherto ghostly celebrity
of the movies.
“She’s lovely,” said Daisy.
“The man bending over her is her director.”
He took them ceremoniously from group to group:
“Mrs. Buchanan . . . and Mr. Buchanan—” After an instant’s
hesitation he added: “the polo player.”
“Oh no,” objected Tom quickly, “not me.”
But evidently the sound of it pleased Gatsby, for Tom remained “the polo player”
for the rest of the evening.
“I’ve never met so many celebrities!” Daisy exclaimed.
“I liked that man—what was his name?—with the sort of
blue nose.”
Gatsby identified him, adding that he was a small producer.
“Well, I liked him anyhow.”
“I’d a little rather not be the polo player,” said Tom pleasantly,
“I’d rather look at all these famous people in—in oblivion.”
Daisy and Gatsby danced. I remember being surprised by his graceful,
conservative fox-trot—I had never seen him dance before. Then
they sauntered over to my house and sat on the steps for half
an hour, while at her request I remained watchfully in the garden.
“In case there’s a fire or a flood,” she explained,
“or any act of God.”
Tom appeared from his oblivion as we were sitting down to supper together.
“do you mind if I eat with some people over here?”
he said. “A fellow’s getting off some funny stuff.”
“Go ahead,” answered Daisy genially, “and if you want to
take down any addresses here’s my little gold pencil.”. . .
she looked around after a moment and told me the girl was
“common but pretty,” and I knew that except for the
half-hour she’d been alone with Gatsby she wasn’t having a good
time.
We were at a particularly tipsy table. That was my fault—Gatsby
had been called to the phone, and I’d enjoyed these same people
only two weeks before. But what had amused me then turned septic on the air now.
“How do you feel, Miss Baedeker?”
The girl addressed was trying, unsuccessfully, to slump against my shoulder. At this
inquiry she sat up and opened her eyes.
“Wha’?”
A massive and lethargic woman, who had been
urging Daisy to play golf with her at the local club to-morrow,
spoke in Miss Baedeker’s defence:
“Oh, she’s all right now.
When she’s had five or six cocktails she always starts screaming
like that. I tell her she ought to leave it alone.”
“I do leave it alone,” affirmed the accused hollowly.
“We heard you yelling, so I said to Doc Civet here: ‘There’s
somebody that needs your help, Doc.’ ”
“She’s much obliged, I’m sure,” said another friend, without gratitude.
“But you got her dress all wet when you stuck her head in
the pool.”
“Anything I hate is to get my head stuck in a pool,” mumbled Miss Baedeker.
“They almost drowned me once over in New Jersey.”
“Then you ought to leave it alone,” countered Doctor Civet.
“Speak for yourself!” cried Miss Baedeker violently.
“Your hand shakes. I wouldn’t let you operate on me!”
It was like that. Almost the last thing I remember was standing
with Daisy and watching the moving-picture director and his Star.
They were still under the white plum tree and their faces were
touching except for a pale, thin ray of moonlight between.
It occurred to me that he had been very slowly bending toward
her all evening to attain this proximity, and even while I watched
I saw him stoop one ultimate degree and kiss at her cheek.
“I like her,” said Daisy, “I think she’s lovely.”
But the rest offended her—and inarguably, because it wasn’t
a gesture but an emotion. She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented
“place” that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island
fishing village—appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under
the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its
inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw
something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.
I sat on the front steps with them while they waited for their
car. It was dark here in front; only the bright door sent ten
square feet of light volleying out into the soft black morning.
Sometimes a shadow moved against a dressing-room blind above,
gave way to another shadow, an indefinite procession of shadows,
who rouged and powdered in an invisible glass.
“Who is this Gatsby anyhow?” demanded Tom suddenly. “Some big bootlegger?”
“Where’d you hear that?” I inquired.
“I didn’t hear it. I imagined it. A lot of these newly rich
people are just big bootleggers, you know.”
“Not Gatsby,” I said shortly.
He was silent for a moment. The pebbles of the drive crunched
under his feet.
“Well, he certainly must have strained himself to get this
menagerie together.”
A breeze stirred the gray haze of Daisy’s fur collar.
“At least they’re more interesting than the people we know,”
she said with an effort.
“You didn’t look so interested.”
“Well, I was.”
Tom laughed and turned to me.
“Did you notice Daisy’s face when that girl asked her to
put her under a cold shower?”
Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper, bringing out a meaning in
each word that it had never had before and would never have again.
When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it,
in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little
of her warm human magic upon the air.
“Lots of people come who haven’t been invited,” she
said suddenly. “That girl hadn’t been invited.
They simply force their way in and he’s too polite to object.”
“I’d like to know who he is and what he does,” insisted
Tom. “And I think I’ll make a point of finding out.”
“I can tell you right now,” she answered. “He owned some
drug-stores, a lot of drug-stores. He built them up himself.”
The dilatory limousine came rolling up the drive.
“Good night, Nick,” said Daisy.
Her glance left me and sought the lighted top of the steps, where
“Three o’clock in the Morning,” a neat, sad little
waltz of that year, was drifting out the open door. After all,
in the very casualness of Gatsby’s party there were romantic possibilities
totally absent from her world. What was it up there in the song
that seemed to be calling her back inside? What would happen now
in the dim, incalculable hours? Perhaps some unbelievable guest
would arrive, a person infinitely rare and to be marvelled at,
some authentically radiant young girl who with one fresh glance
at Gatsby, one moment of magical encounter, would blot out those
five years of unwavering devotion.
I stayed late that night,
Gatsby asked me to wait until he was free, and I lingered in the
garden until the inevitable swimming party had run up, chilled
and exalted, from the black beach, until the lights were extinguished
in the guest-rooms overhead.
When he came down the steps at last the tanned skin was drawn
unusually tight on his face, and his eyes were bright and tired.
“She didn’t like it,” he said immediately.
“Of course she did.”
“She didn’t like it,” he insisted. “She didn’t have a good time.”
He was silent, and I guessed at his unutterable depression.
“I feel far away from her,” he said. “It’s hard to make her understand.”
“You mean about the dance?”
“The dance?” He dismissed all the dances he had given with a snap of his fingers.
“Old sport, the dance is unimportant.”
He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: “I
never loved you.” After she had obliterated four years with
that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures
to be taken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were
to go back to Louisville and be married from her house—just
as if it were five years ago.
“And she doesn’t understand,” he said. “She used to be able
to understand. We’d sit for hours—”
He broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate
path of fruit rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers.
“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.”
“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just
out of reach of his hand.
“I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,”
he said, nodding determinedly. “She’ll see.”
He talked a lot about the past, and I
gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself
perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused
and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain
starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what
that thing was. . . .
. . . one autumn night, five years before, they had been walking
down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to
a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with
moonlight.
They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool
night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the
two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming
out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the
stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks
of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret
place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone,
and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the
incomparable milk of wonder.
His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up
to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever
wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind
would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening
for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon
a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for
him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality,
I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of
lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a
moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted
like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them
than a wisp of startled air.
But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable
forever.
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