Chapter IX
AFTER two years I remember the rest of that day, and that night
and the next day, only as an endless drill of police and photographers
and newspaper men in and out of Gatsby’s front door. A rope stretched
across the main gate and a policeman by it kept out the curious,
but little boys soon discovered that they could enter through
my yard, and there were always a few of them clustered open-mouthed
about the pool. Someone with a positive manner, perhaps a detective,
used the expression “madman” as he bent over Wilson’s
body that afternoon, and the adventitious authority of his voice
set the key for the newspaper reports next morning.
Most of those reports were a nightmare—grotesque, circumstantial,
eager, and untrue. When Michaelis’s testimony at the inquest brought
to light Wilson’s suspicions of his wife I thought the whole tale
would shortly be served up in racy pasquinade—but Catherine,
who might have said anything, didn’t say a word. She showed a
surprising amount of character about it too—looked at the coroner
with determined eyes under that corrected brow of hers, and swore
that her sister had never seen Gatsby, that her sister was completely
happy with her husband, that her sister had been into no mischief
whatever. She convinced herself of it, and cried into her handkerchief,
as if the very suggestion was more than she could endure. So Wilson
was reduced to a man “deranged by grief” in order that
the case might remain in its simplist form. And it rested there.
But all this part of it seemed remote and unessential.
I found myself on Gatsby’s side, and alone.
From the moment I telephoned news of the catastrophe to West Egg
village, every surmise about him, and every practical question,
was referred to me. At first I was surprised and confused; then,
as he lay in his house and didn’t move or breathe or speak, hour
upon hour, it grew upon me that I was responsible, because no
one else was interested—interested, I mean, with that intense
personal interest to which every one has some vague right at the
end.
I called up Daisy half an hour after we found him, called her
instinctively and without hesitation. But she and Tom had gone
away early that afternoon, and taken baggage 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 reassure him: “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, and no one answered the phone.
“Will you ring again?”
“I’ve rung them three times.”
“It’s very important.”
“Sorry. I’m afraid no one’s there.”
I went back to the drawing-room and thought for
an instant that they were chance visitors, all these official
people who suddenly filled it. But, as they drew back the sheet
and looked at Gatsby with unmoved eyes, his protest continued
in my brain:
“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.”
Some one started to ask me questions, but I broke away and going
up-stairs looked hastily through the unlocked parts of his desk—he’d
never told me definitely that his parents were dead. But
there was nothing—only the picture of Dan Cody, a token of forgotten
violence, staring down from the wall.
Next morning I sent the butler to New York with a letter to Wolfshiem,
which asked for information and urged him to come out on the next
train. That request seemed superfluous when I wrote it. I was
sure he’d start when he saw the newspapers, just as I was sure
there’d be a wire from Daisy before noon—but neither a wire
nor Mr. Wolfshiem arrived; no one arrived except more police and
photographers and newspaper men. When the butler brought back
Wolfshiem’s answer I began to have a feeling of defiance, of scornful
solidarity between Gatsby and me against them all.
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 hasty addenda beneath:
Let me know about the funeral etc do not know his family at all.
When the phone rang that afternoon and Long Distance said Chicago
was calling I thought this would be Daisy at last. But the connection
came through as a man’s voice, very thin and far away.
“This is Slagle speaking. . .”
“Yes?” The name was unfamiliar.
“Hell of a note, isn’t it? Get my wire?”
“There haven’t been any wires.”
“Young Parke’s in trouble,” he said rapidly.
“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 wire, followed
by an exclamation . . . then a quick squawk as the connection
was broken.
I think it was on the third day that a telegram signed Henry C.
Gatz arrived from a town in MinnesotA.
It said only that the sender was leaving immediately and to postpone
the funeral until he came.
It was Gatsby’s father, a solemn old man, very helpless and dismayed,
bundled up in a long cheap ulster against the warm September day.
His eyes leaked continuously with excitement, and when I took
the bag and umbrella from his hands he began to pull so incessantly
at his sparse gray beard that I had difficulty in getting off
his coat. He was on the point of collapse, so I took him into
the music room and made him sit down while I sent for something
to eat. But he wouldn’t eat, and the glass of milk spilled from
his trembling 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, seeing nothing, moved ceaselessly about the room.
“It was a madman,” he said. “He must have been mad.”
“Wouldn’t you like some coffee?” I urged him.
“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; when I told them
who had arrived, they went reluctantly away.
After a little while Mr. Gatz opened the door and came out, his
mouth ajar, his face flushed slightly, his eyes leaking isolated
and unpunctual tears. He had reached an age where death no longer
has the quality of ghastly surprise, and when he looked around
him now for the first time and saw the height and splendor of
the hall and the great rooms opening out from it into other rooms,
his grief began to be mixed with an awed pride. I helped him to
a bedroom up-stairs; while he took off his coat and vest I told
him that all arrangements had been deferred until he came.
“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 impressively, 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, uncomfortably.
He fumbled at the embroidered coverlet, trying to take it from
the bed, and lay down stiffly—was instantly asleep.
That night an obviously frightened person called up, and demanded 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, for that seemed to promise another friend
at Gatsby’s grave. I didn’t want it to be in the papers and draw
a sightseeing crowd, so I’d been calling up a few people myself.
They were hard to find.
“The funeral’s to-morrow,” I said.
“Three o’clock, here at the house. I wish you’d tell anybody
who’d be interested.”
“Oh, I will,” he broke out hastily.
“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
to-morrow.
In fact, there’s a sort of picnic or something.
Of course I’ll do my very best to get away.”
I ejaculated an unrestrained “Huh!” and he must have heard me, for
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 hung
up the receiver.
After that I felt a certain shame for Gatsby—one gentleman to
whom I telephoned implied that he had got what he deserved. However,
that was my fault, for he was one of those who used to sneer most
bitterly at Gatsby on the courage of Gatsby’s liquor, and I should
have known better than to call him.
The morning of the funeral I went up to New York to see Meyer
Wolfshiem; I couldn’t seem to reach him any other way. The door
that I pushed open, on the advice of an elevator boy, was marked
“The Swastika Holding Company,” and at first there
didn’t seem to be any one inside. But when I’d shouted
“hello” several times in vain, an argument broke out behind a partition,
and presently a lovely Jewess appeared at an interior door and
scrutinized me with black hostile eyes.
“Nobody’s in,” she said. “Mr. Wolfshiem’s gone to Chicago.”
The first part of this was obviously untrue, for someone had begun to whistle
“The Rosary,” tunelessly, inside.
“Please say that Mr. Carraway wants to see him.”
“I can’t get him back from Chicago, can I?”
At this moment a voice, unmistakably Wolfshiem’s, called “Stella!”
from the other side of the door.
“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 and began to slide her hands indignantly up and down her hips.
“You young men think you can force your way in here any time,”
she scolded.
“We’re getting sickantired of it. When I say
he’s in Chicago, he’s in Chicago.”
I mentioned Gatsby.
“Oh-h!” She looked at me over again.
“Will you just——What was your name?”
She vanished. In a moment Meyer Wolfshiem stood solemnly in the doorway, holding
out both hands. He drew me into his office, remarking in a reverent
voice that it was a sad time for all of us, and offered me a cigar.
“My memory goes back to when I first 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 come 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 inquired.
“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 an Oggsford I knew I could use him good. I got him to
join up in 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
bulbous fingers—” always together.”
I wondered if this partnership had included the World’s Series transaction 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 quivered
slightly, and as he shook his head 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 for some reason of his own he was determined not to come, so I stood up.
“Are you a college man?” he inquired 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 suggested.
“After that my own rule is to let everything alone.”
When I left his office the sky had turned dark and I got back
to West Egg in a drizzle. After changing my clothes I went next
door and found Mr. Gatz walking up and down excitedly in the hall.
His pride in his son and in his son’s possessions was continually
increasing and now he had something to show me.
“Jimmy sent me this picture.” He took out his wallet
with trembling fingers. “Look there.”
It was a photograph of the house, cracked
in the corners and dirty with many hands. He pointed out every
detail to me eagerly. “Look there!” and then sought admiration from my eyes.
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 seemed reluctant to put
away the picture, held it for another minute, lingeringly, before
my eyes. Then he returned the wallet and pulled from his pocket 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 fly-leaf was printed the word SCHEDULE, and the
date September 12th, 1906. and underneath:
Rise from bed ....................... 6.00 A.M.
Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling .. 6.15-6.30 "
Study electricity, etc............... 7.15-8.15 "
Work................................. 8.30-4.30 P.M.
Baseball and sports.................. 4.30-5.00 "
Practice elocution, poise and how to
attain it 5.00-6.00 "
Study needed inventions...............7.00-9.00 "
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 come 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 was reluctant to close the book, reading each item aloud and
then looking eagerly at me. I think he rather expected me to copy
down the list for my own use.
A little before three the Lutheran minister arrived from Flushing,
and I began to look involuntarily out the windows for other cars.
So did Gatsby’s father. And as the time passed and the servants
came in and stood waiting in the hall, his eyes began to blink
anxiously, and he spoke of the rain in a worried, uncertain way.
The minister glanced several times at his watch, 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 procession of three cars reached the cemetery
and stopped in a thick drizzle beside the gate—first a motor
hearse, horribly black and wet, then Mr. Gatz and the minister
and I in the limousine, and a little later four or five servants
and the postman from West Egg in Gatsby’s station wagon, all wet
to the skin. As we started through the gate into the cemetery
I heard a car stop and then the sound of someone splashing after
us over the soggy ground. I looked around. It was the man with
owl-eyed glasses whom I had found marvelling over Gatsby’s books
in the library one night three months before.
I’d never seen him since then. I don’t know how he knew about
the funeral, or even his name. The rain poured down his thick
glasses, and he took them off and wiped them to see the protecting
canvas unrolled from Gatsby’s grave.
I tried to think about Gatsby then for a moment, but he was already
too far away, and I could only remember, without resentment, that
Daisy hadn’t sent a message or a flower. Dimly I heard someone
murmur, “Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on,”
and then the owl-eyed man said “Amen to that,” in a
brave voice.
We straggled down quickly through the rain to the cars. Owl-eyes
spoke to me by the gate.
“I couldn’t get to the house,” he remarked.
“Neither could anybody else.”
“Go on!” He started. “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 most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep
school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went
farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station
at six o’clock of a December evening, with a few Chicago friends,
already caught up into their own holiday gayeties, to bid them
a hasty good-by.
I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss THIS-OR-that’s
and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead
as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of
invitations:
“Are you going to the Ordways’? the Herseys’?
the Schultzes’?” and the long green tickets clasped tight
in our gloved hands. And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago,
Milwaukee & St. Paul railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks
beside the gate.
When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our
snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows,
and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp
wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths
of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules,
unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange
hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.
That’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost
Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and
the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows
of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part
of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters,
a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a
city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s
name. 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,
and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made
us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.
Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly
aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns
beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared
only the children and the very old—even then it had always for
me a quality of distortion. West Egg, especially, still figures
in my more fantastic dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco:
a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching
under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon. In the
foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the
sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white
evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles
cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house—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, distorted
beyond my eyes’ power of correction. So when the blue smoke of
brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry
stiff on the line I decided to come back home.
There was one thing to be done before I left, an awkward, unpleasant
thing that perhaps had better have been let alone. But I wanted
to leave things in order and not just trust that obliging and
indifferent sea to sweep my refuse away. I saw Jordan Baker and
talked over and around what had happened to us together, and what
had happened afterward to me, and she lay perfectly still, listening,
in a big chair.
She was dressed to play golf, and I remember thinking she looked
like a good illustration, her chin raised a little jauntily, her
hair the color of an autumn leaf, her face the same brown tint
as the fingerless glove on her knee. When I had finished she told
me without comment that she was engaged to another man. I doubted
that, though there were several she could have married at a nod
of her head, but I pretended to be surprised. For just a minute
I wondered if I wasn’t making a mistake, then I thought it all
over again quickly and got up to say good-by.
“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 honor.”
She didn’t answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously
sorry, I turned away.
One afternoon late in October I saw Tom Buchanan.
He was walking ahead of me along Fifth Avenue in his alert, aggressive
way, his hands out a little from his body as if to fight off interference,
his head moving sharply here and there, adapting itself to his
restless eyes. Just as I slowed up to avoid overtaking him he
stopped and began frowning into the windows of a jewelry store.
Suddenly he saw me and 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 inquired, “what did you say to Wilson
that afternoon?”
He stared at me without a word, and 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,
and when I sent down word that we weren’t in he tried to force
his way up-stairs. 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 broke off defiantly.
“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, except the one
unutterable fact that 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 and 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 what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.
It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people,
Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then
retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or
whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people
clean up the mess they had made. . . .
I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly
as though I were talking to a child.
Then he went into the jewelry store to buy a pearl necklace—or
perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons—rid of my provincial
squeamishness forever.
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 took a fare past the entrance gate without stopping
for a minute and pointing inside; perhaps it was he who drove
Daisy and Gatsby over to East Egg the night of the accident, and
perhaps he had made a story about it all 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 those gleaming,
dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still
hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant, from his
garden, and the cars going up and down his drive. One night I
did hear a material car there, and saw its lights stop at his
front steps. But I didn’t investigate.
Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends
of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over.
On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the
grocer, I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure
of a house once more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled
by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight,
and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then
I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand.
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly
any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across
the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses
began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island
here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green
breast of the new world.
Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house,
had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all
human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have
held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into
an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired,
face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate
to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought
of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at
the end of Daisy’s dock.
He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have
seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did
not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that
vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic
rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year
by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no
matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms
farther. . . . and one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against
the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
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