From 559985687dceea83001f5495d21a14c6fe6b0858 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Cassie Jones Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2019 23:37:53 -0400 Subject: [PATCH] Add some important files --- bee-movie.txt | 3268 +++++++++++++++++++++++++ gatsby.txt | 6333 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 2 files changed, 9601 insertions(+) create mode 100644 bee-movie.txt create mode 100644 gatsby.txt diff --git a/bee-movie.txt b/bee-movie.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1805cfa --- /dev/null +++ b/bee-movie.txt @@ -0,0 +1,3268 @@ +According to all known laws +of aviation, + +there is no way a bee +should be able to fly. + +Its wings are too small to get +its fat little body off the ground. + +The bee, of course, flies anyway + +because bees don't care +what humans think is impossible. + +Yellow, black. Yellow, black. +Yellow, black. Yellow, black. + +Ooh, black and yellow! +Let's shake it up a little. + +Barry! Breakfast is ready! + +Coming! + +Hang on a second. + +Hello? + +- Barry? +- Adam? + +- Can you believe this is happening? +- I can't. I'll pick you up. + +Looking sharp. + +Use the stairs. Your father +paid good money for those. + +Sorry. I'm excited. + +Here's the graduate. +We're very proud of you, son. + +A perfect report card, all B's. + +Very proud. + +Ma! I got a thing going here. + +- You got lint on your fuzz. +- Ow! That's me! + +- Wave to us! We'll be in row 118,000. +- Bye! + +Barry, I told you, +stop flying in the house! + +- Hey, Adam. +- Hey, Barry. + +- Is that fuzz gel? +- A little. Special day, graduation. + +Never thought I'd make it. + +Three days grade school, +three days high school. + +Those were awkward. + +Three days college. I'm glad I took +a day and hitchhiked around the hive. + +You did come back different. + +- Hi, Barry. +- Artie, growing a mustache? Looks good. + +- Hear about Frankie? +- Yeah. + +- You going to the funeral? +- No, I'm not going. + +Everybody knows, +sting someone, you die. + +Don't waste it on a squirrel. +Such a hothead. + +I guess he could have +just gotten out of the way. + +I love this incorporating +an amusement park into our day. + +That's why we don't need vacations. + +Boy, quite a bit of pomp... +under the circumstances. + +- Well, Adam, today we are men. +- We are! + +- Bee-men. +- Amen! + +Hallelujah! + +Students, faculty, distinguished bees, + +please welcome Dean Buzzwell. + +Welcome, New Hive City +graduating class of... + +...9:15. + +That concludes our ceremonies. + +And begins your career +at Honex Industries! + +Will we pick ourjob today? + +I heard it's just orientation. + +Heads up! Here we go. + +Keep your hands and antennas +inside the tram at all times. + +- Wonder what it'll be like? +- A little scary. + +Welcome to Honex, +a division of Honesco + +and a part of the Hexagon Group. + +This is it! + +Wow. + +Wow. + +We know that you, as a bee, +have worked your whole life + +to get to the point where you +can work for your whole life. + +Honey begins when our valiant Pollen +Jocks bring the nectar to the hive. + +Our top-secret formula + +is automatically color-corrected, +scent-adjusted and bubble-contoured + +into this soothing sweet syrup + +with its distinctive +golden glow you know as... + +Honey! + +- That girl was hot. +- She's my cousin! + +- She is? +- Yes, we're all cousins. + +- Right. You're right. +- At Honex, we constantly strive + +to improve every aspect +of bee existence. + +These bees are stress-testing +a new helmet technology. + +- What do you think he makes? +- Not enough. + +Here we have our latest advancement, +the Krelman. + +- What does that do? +- Catches that little strand of honey + +that hangs after you pour it. +Saves us millions. + +Can anyone work on the Krelman? + +Of course. Most bee jobs are +small ones. But bees know + +that every small job, +if it's done well, means a lot. + +But choose carefully + +because you'll stay in the job +you pick for the rest of your life. + +The same job the rest of your life? +I didn't know that. + +What's the difference? + +You'll be happy to know that bees, +as a species, haven't had one day off + +in 27 million years. + +So you'll just work us to death? + +We'll sure try. + +Wow! That blew my mind! + +"What's the difference?" +How can you say that? + +One job forever? +That's an insane choice to have to make. + +I'm relieved. Now we only have +to make one decision in life. + +But, Adam, how could they +never have told us that? + +Why would you question anything? +We're bees. + +We're the most perfectly +functioning society on Earth. + +You ever think maybe things +work a little too well here? + +Like what? Give me one example. + +I don't know. But you know +what I'm talking about. + +Please clear the gate. +Royal Nectar Force on approach. + +Wait a second. Check it out. + +- Hey, those are Pollen Jocks! +- Wow. + +I've never seen them this close. + +They know what it's like +outside the hive. + +Yeah, but some don't come back. + +- Hey, Jocks! +- Hi, Jocks! + +You guys did great! + +You're monsters! +You're sky freaks! I love it! I love it! + +- I wonder where they were. +- I don't know. + +Their day's not planned. + +Outside the hive, flying who knows +where, doing who knows what. + +You can'tjust decide to be a Pollen +Jock. You have to be bred for that. + +Right. + +Look. That's more pollen +than you and I will see in a lifetime. + +It's just a status symbol. +Bees make too much of it. + +Perhaps. Unless you're wearing it +and the ladies see you wearing it. + +Those ladies? +Aren't they our cousins too? + +Distant. Distant. + +Look at these two. + +- Couple of Hive Harrys. +- Let's have fun with them. + +It must be dangerous +being a Pollen Jock. + +Yeah. Once a bear pinned me +against a mushroom! + +He had a paw on my throat, +and with the other, he was slapping me! + +- Oh, my! +- I never thought I'd knock him out. + +What were you doing during this? + +Trying to alert the authorities. + +I can autograph that. + +A little gusty out there today, +wasn't it, comrades? + +Yeah. Gusty. + +We're hitting a sunflower patch +six miles from here tomorrow. + +- Six miles, huh? +- Barry! + +A puddle jump for us, +but maybe you're not up for it. + +- Maybe I am. +- You are not! + +We're going 0900 at J-Gate. + +What do you think, buzzy-boy? +Are you bee enough? + +I might be. It all depends +on what 0900 means. + +Hey, Honex! + +Dad, you surprised me. + +You decide what you're interested in? + +- Well, there's a lot of choices. +- But you only get one. + +Do you ever get bored +doing the same job every day? + +Son, let me tell you about stirring. + +You grab that stick, and you just +move it around, and you stir it around. + +You get yourself into a rhythm. +It's a beautiful thing. + +You know, Dad, +the more I think about it, + +maybe the honey field +just isn't right for me. + +You were thinking of what, +making balloon animals? + +That's a bad job +for a guy with a stinger. + +Janet, your son's not sure +he wants to go into honey! + +- Barry, you are so funny sometimes. +- I'm not trying to be funny. + +You're not funny! You're going +into honey. Our son, the stirrer! + +- You're gonna be a stirrer? +- No one's listening to me! + +Wait till you see the sticks I have. + +I could say anything right now. +I'm gonna get an ant tattoo! + +Let's open some honey and celebrate! + +Maybe I'll pierce my thorax. +Shave my antennae. + +Shack up with a grasshopper. Get +a gold tooth and call everybody "dawg"! + +I'm so proud. + +- We're starting work today! +- Today's the day. + +Come on! All the good jobs +will be gone. + +Yeah, right. + +Pollen counting, stunt bee, pouring, +stirrer, front desk, hair removal... + +- Is it still available? +- Hang on. Two left! + +One of them's yours! Congratulations! +Step to the side. + +- What'd you get? +- Picking crud out. Stellar! + +Wow! + +Couple of newbies? + +Yes, sir! Our first day! We are ready! + +Make your choice. + +- You want to go first? +- No, you go. + +Oh, my. What's available? + +Restroom attendant's open, +not for the reason you think. + +- Any chance of getting the Krelman? +- Sure, you're on. + +I'm sorry, the Krelman just closed out. + +Wax monkey's always open. + +The Krelman opened up again. + +What happened? + +A bee died. Makes an opening. See? +He's dead. Another dead one. + +Deady. Deadified. Two more dead. + +Dead from the neck up. +Dead from the neck down. That's life! + +Oh, this is so hard! + +Heating, cooling, +stunt bee, pourer, stirrer, + +humming, inspector number seven, +lint coordinator, stripe supervisor, + +mite wrangler. Barry, what +do you think I should... Barry? + +Barry! + +All right, we've got the sunflower patch +in quadrant nine... + +What happened to you? +Where are you? + +- I'm going out. +- Out? Out where? + +- Out there. +- Oh, no! + +I have to, before I go +to work for the rest of my life. + +You're gonna die! You're crazy! Hello? + +Another call coming in. + +If anyone's feeling brave, +there's a Korean deli on 83rd + +that gets their roses today. + +Hey, guys. + +- Look at that. +- Isn't that the kid we saw yesterday? + +Hold it, son, flight deck's restricted. + +It's OK, Lou. We're gonna take him up. + +Really? Feeling lucky, are you? + +Sign here, here. Just initial that. + +- Thank you. +- OK. + +You got a rain advisory today, + +and as you all know, +bees cannot fly in rain. + +So be careful. As always, +watch your brooms, + +hockey sticks, dogs, +birds, bears and bats. + +Also, I got a couple of reports +of root beer being poured on us. + +Murphy's in a home because of it, +babbling like a cicada! + +- That's awful. +- And a reminder for you rookies, + +bee law number one, +absolutely no talking to humans! + +All right, launch positions! + +Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz! Buzz, buzz, +buzz, buzz! Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz! + +Black and yellow! + +Hello! + +You ready for this, hot shot? + +Yeah. Yeah, bring it on. + +Wind, check. + +- Antennae, check. +- Nectar pack, check. + +- Wings, check. +- Stinger, check. + +Scared out of my shorts, check. + +OK, ladies, + +let's move it out! + +Pound those petunias, +you striped stem-suckers! + +All of you, drain those flowers! + +Wow! I'm out! + +I can't believe I'm out! + +So blue. + +I feel so fast and free! + +Box kite! + +Wow! + +Flowers! + +This is Blue Leader. +We have roses visual. + +Bring it around 30 degrees and hold. + +Roses! + +30 degrees, roger. Bringing it around. + +Stand to the side, kid. +It's got a bit of a kick. + +That is one nectar collector! + +- Ever see pollination up close? +- No, sir. + +I pick up some pollen here, sprinkle it +over here. Maybe a dash over there, + +a pinch on that one. +See that? It's a little bit of magic. + +That's amazing. Why do we do that? + +That's pollen power. More pollen, more +flowers, more nectar, more honey for us. + +Cool. + +I'm picking up a lot of bright yellow. +Could be daisies. Don't we need those? + +Copy that visual. + +Wait. One of these flowers +seems to be on the move. + +Say again? You're reporting +a moving flower? + +Affirmative. + +That was on the line! + +This is the coolest. What is it? + +I don't know, but I'm loving this color. + +It smells good. +Not like a flower, but I like it. + +Yeah, fuzzy. + +Chemical-y. + +Careful, guys. It's a little grabby. + +My sweet lord of bees! + +Candy-brain, get off there! + +Problem! + +- Guys! +- This could be bad. + +Affirmative. + +Very close. + +Gonna hurt. + +Mama's little boy. + +You are way out of position, rookie! + +Coming in at you like a missile! + +Help me! + +I don't think these are flowers. + +- Should we tell him? +- I think he knows. + +What is this?! + +Match point! + +You can start packing up, honey, +because you're about to eat it! + +Yowser! + +Gross. + +There's a bee in the car! + +- Do something! +- I'm driving! + +- Hi, bee. +- He's back here! + +He's going to sting me! + +Nobody move. If you don't move, +he won't sting you. Freeze! + +He blinked! + +Spray him, Granny! + +What are you doing?! + +Wow... the tension level +out here is unbelievable. + +I gotta get home. + +Can't fly in rain. + +Can't fly in rain. + +Can't fly in rain. + +Mayday! Mayday! Bee going down! + +Ken, could you close +the window please? + +Ken, could you close +the window please? + +Check out my new resume. +I made it into a fold-out brochure. + +You see? Folds out. + +Oh, no. More humans. I don't need this. + +What was that? + +Maybe this time. This time. This time. +This time! This time! This... + +Drapes! + +That is diabolical. + +It's fantastic. It's got all my special +skills, even my top-ten favorite movies. + +What's number one? Star Wars? + +Nah, I don't go for that... + +...kind of stuff. + +No wonder we shouldn't talk to them. +They're out of their minds. + +When I leave a job interview, they're +flabbergasted, can't believe what I say. + +There's the sun. Maybe that's a way out. + +I don't remember the sun +having a big 75 on it. + +I predicted global warming. + +I could feel it getting hotter. +At first I thought it was just me. + +Wait! Stop! Bee! + +Stand back. These are winter boots. + +Wait! + +Don't kill him! + +You know I'm allergic to them! +This thing could kill me! + +Why does his life have +less value than yours? + +Why does his life have any less value +than mine? Is that your statement? + +I'm just saying all life has value. You +don't know what he's capable of feeling. + +My brochure! + +There you go, little guy. + +I'm not scared of him. +It's an allergic thing. + +Put that on your resume brochure. + +My whole face could puff up. + +Make it one of your special skills. + +Knocking someone out +is also a special skill. + +Right. Bye, Vanessa. Thanks. + +- Vanessa, next week? Yogurt night? +- Sure, Ken. You know, whatever. + +- You could put carob chips on there. +- Bye. + +- Supposed to be less calories. +- Bye. + +I gotta say something. + +She saved my life. +I gotta say something. + +All right, here it goes. + +Nah. + +What would I say? + +I could really get in trouble. + +It's a bee law. +You're not supposed to talk to a human. + +I can't believe I'm doing this. + +I've got to. + +Oh, I can't do it. Come on! + +No. Yes. No. + +Do it. I can't. + +How should I start it? +"You like jazz?" No, that's no good. + +Here she comes! Speak, you fool! + +Hi! + +I'm sorry. + +- You're talking. +- Yes, I know. + +You're talking! + +I'm so sorry. + +No, it's OK. It's fine. +I know I'm dreaming. + +But I don't recall going to bed. + +Well, I'm sure this +is very disconcerting. + +This is a bit of a surprise to me. +I mean, you're a bee! + +I am. And I'm not supposed +to be doing this, + +but they were all trying to kill me. + +And if it wasn't for you... + +I had to thank you. +It's just how I was raised. + +That was a little weird. + +- I'm talking with a bee. +- Yeah. + +I'm talking to a bee. +And the bee is talking to me! + +I just want to say I'm grateful. +I'll leave now. + +- Wait! How did you learn to do that? +- What? + +The talking thing. + +Same way you did, I guess. +"Mama, Dada, honey." You pick it up. + +- That's very funny. +- Yeah. + +Bees are funny. If we didn't laugh, +we'd cry with what we have to deal with. + +Anyway... + +Can I... + +...get you something? +- Like what? + +I don't know. I mean... +I don't know. Coffee? + +I don't want to put you out. + +It's no trouble. It takes two minutes. + +- It's just coffee. +- I hate to impose. + +- Don't be ridiculous! +- Actually, I would love a cup. + +Hey, you want rum cake? + +- I shouldn't. +- Have some. + +- No, I can't. +- Come on! + +I'm trying to lose a couple micrograms. + +- Where? +- These stripes don't help. + +You look great! + +I don't know if you know +anything about fashion. + +Are you all right? + +No. + +He's making the tie in the cab +as they're flying up Madison. + +He finally gets there. + +He runs up the steps into the church. +The wedding is on. + +And he says, "Watermelon? +I thought you said Guatemalan. + +Why would I marry a watermelon?" + +Is that a bee joke? + +That's the kind of stuff we do. + +Yeah, different. + +So, what are you gonna do, Barry? + +About work? I don't know. + +I want to do my part for the hive, +but I can't do it the way they want. + +I know how you feel. + +- You do? +- Sure. + +My parents wanted me to be a lawyer or +a doctor, but I wanted to be a florist. + +- Really? +- My only interest is flowers. + +Our new queen was just elected +with that same campaign slogan. + +Anyway, if you look... + +There's my hive right there. See it? + +You're in Sheep Meadow! + +Yes! I'm right off the Turtle Pond! + +No way! I know that area. +I lost a toe ring there once. + +- Why do girls put rings on their toes? +- Why not? + +- It's like putting a hat on your knee. +- Maybe I'll try that. + +- You all right, ma'am? +- Oh, yeah. Fine. + +Just having two cups of coffee! + +Anyway, this has been great. +Thanks for the coffee. + +Yeah, it's no trouble. + +Sorry I couldn't finish it. If I did, +I'd be up the rest of my life. + +Are you...? + +Can I take a piece of this with me? + +Sure! Here, have a crumb. + +- Thanks! +- Yeah. + +All right. Well, then... +I guess I'll see you around. + +Or not. + +OK, Barry. + +And thank you +so much again... for before. + +Oh, that? That was nothing. + +Well, not nothing, but... Anyway... + +This can't possibly work. + +He's all set to go. +We may as well try it. + +OK, Dave, pull the chute. + +- Sounds amazing. +- It was amazing! + +It was the scariest, +happiest moment of my life. + +Humans! I can't believe +you were with humans! + +Giant, scary humans! +What were they like? + +Huge and crazy. They talk crazy. + +They eat crazy giant things. +They drive crazy. + +- Do they try and kill you, like on TV? +- Some of them. But some of them don't. + +- How'd you get back? +- Poodle. + +You did it, and I'm glad. You saw +whatever you wanted to see. + +You had your "experience." Now you +can pick out yourjob and be normal. + +- Well... +- Well? + +Well, I met someone. + +You did? Was she Bee-ish? + +- A wasp?! Your parents will kill you! +- No, no, no, not a wasp. + +- Spider? +- I'm not attracted to spiders. + +I know it's the hottest thing, +with the eight legs and all. + +I can't get by that face. + +So who is she? + +She's... human. + +No, no. That's a bee law. +You wouldn't break a bee law. + +- Her name's Vanessa. +- Oh, boy. + +She's so nice. And she's a florist! + +Oh, no! You're dating a human florist! + +We're not dating. + +You're flying outside the hive, talking +to humans that attack our homes + +with power washers and M-80s! +One-eighth a stick of dynamite! + +She saved my life! +And she understands me. + +This is over! + +Eat this. + +This is not over! What was that? + +- They call it a crumb. +- It was so stingin' stripey! + +And that's not what they eat. +That's what falls off what they eat! + +- You know what a Cinnabon is? +- No. + +It's bread and cinnamon and frosting. +They heat it up... + +Sit down! + +...really hot! +- Listen to me! + +We are not them! We're us. +There's us and there's them! + +Yes, but who can deny +the heart that is yearning? + +There's no yearning. +Stop yearning. Listen to me! + +You have got to start thinking bee, +my friend. Thinking bee! + +- Thinking bee. +- Thinking bee. + +Thinking bee! Thinking bee! +Thinking bee! Thinking bee! + +There he is. He's in the pool. + +You know what your problem is, Barry? + +I gotta start thinking bee? + +How much longer will this go on? + +It's been three days! +Why aren't you working? + +I've got a lot of big life decisions +to think about. + +What life? You have no life! +You have no job. You're barely a bee! + +Would it kill you +to make a little honey? + +Barry, come out. +Your father's talking to you. + +Martin, would you talk to him? + +Barry, I'm talking to you! + +You coming? + +Got everything? + +All set! + +Go ahead. I'll catch up. + +Don't be too long. + +Watch this! + +Vanessa! + +- We're still here. +- I told you not to yell at him. + +He doesn't respond to yelling! + +- Then why yell at me? +- Because you don't listen! + +I'm not listening to this. + +Sorry, I've gotta go. + +- Where are you going? +- I'm meeting a friend. + +A girl? Is this why you can't decide? + +Bye. + +I just hope she's Bee-ish. + +They have a huge parade +of flowers every year in Pasadena? + +To be in the Tournament of Roses, +that's every florist's dream! + +Up on a float, surrounded +by flowers, crowds cheering. + +A tournament. Do the roses +compete in athletic events? + +No. All right, I've got one. +How come you don't fly everywhere? + +It's exhausting. Why don't you +run everywhere? It's faster. + +Yeah, OK, I see, I see. +All right, your turn. + +TiVo. You can just freeze live TV? +That's insane! + +You don't have that? + +We have Hivo, but it's a disease. +It's a horrible, horrible disease. + +Oh, my. + +Dumb bees! + +You must want to sting all those jerks. + +We try not to sting. +It's usually fatal for us. + +So you have to watch your temper. + +Very carefully. +You kick a wall, take a walk, + +write an angry letter and throw it out. +Work through it like any emotion: + +Anger, jealousy, lust. + +Oh, my goodness! Are you OK? + +Yeah. + +- What is wrong with you?! +- It's a bug. + +He's not bothering anybody. +Get out of here, you creep! + +What was that? A Pic 'N' Save circular? + +Yeah, it was. How did you know? + +It felt like about 10 pages. +Seventy-five is pretty much our limit. + +You've really got that +down to a science. + +- I lost a cousin to Italian Vogue. +- I'll bet. + +What in the name +of Mighty Hercules is this? + +How did this get here? +Cute Bee, Golden Blossom, + +Ray Liotta Private Select? + +- Is he that actor? +- I never heard of him. + +- Why is this here? +- For people. We eat it. + +You don't have +enough food of your own? + +- Well, yes. +- How do you get it? + +- Bees make it. +- I know who makes it! + +And it's hard to make it! + +There's heating, cooling, stirring. +You need a whole Krelman thing! + +- It's organic. +- It's our-ganic! + +It's just honey, Barry. + +Just what?! + +Bees don't know about this! +This is stealing! A lot of stealing! + +You've taken our homes, schools, +hospitals! This is all we have! + +And it's on sale?! +I'm getting to the bottom of this. + +I'm getting to the bottom +of all of this! + +Hey, Hector. + +- You almost done? +- Almost. + +He is here. I sense it. + +Well, I guess I'll go home now + +and just leave this nice honey out, +with no one around. + +You're busted, box boy! + +I knew I heard something. +So you can talk! + +I can talk. +And now you'll start talking! + +Where you getting the sweet stuff? +Who's your supplier? + +I don't understand. +I thought we were friends. + +The last thing we want +to do is upset bees! + +You're too late! It's ours now! + +You, sir, have crossed +the wrong sword! + +You, sir, will be lunch +for my iguana, Ignacio! + +Where is the honey coming from? + +Tell me where! + +Honey Farms! It comes from Honey Farms! + +Crazy person! + +What horrible thing has happened here? + +These faces, they never knew +what hit them. And now + +they're on the road to nowhere! + +Just keep still. + +What? You're not dead? + +Do I look dead? They will wipe anything +that moves. Where you headed? + +To Honey Farms. +I am onto something huge here. + +I'm going to Alaska. Moose blood, +crazy stuff. Blows your head off! + +I'm going to Tacoma. + +- And you? +- He really is dead. + +All right. + +Uh-oh! + +- What is that?! +- Oh, no! + +- A wiper! Triple blade! +- Triple blade? + +Jump on! It's your only chance, bee! + +Why does everything have +to be so doggone clean?! + +How much do you people need to see?! + +Open your eyes! +Stick your head out the window! + +From NPR News in Washington, +I'm Carl Kasell. + +But don't kill no more bugs! + +- Bee! +- Moose blood guy!! + +- You hear something? +- Like what? + +Like tiny screaming. + +Turn off the radio. + +Whassup, bee boy? + +Hey, Blood. + +Just a row of honey jars, +as far as the eye could see. + +Wow! + +I assume wherever this truck goes +is where they're getting it. + +I mean, that honey's ours. + +- Bees hang tight. +- We're all jammed in. + +It's a close community. + +Not us, man. We on our own. +Every mosquito on his own. + +- What if you get in trouble? +- You a mosquito, you in trouble. + +Nobody likes us. They just smack. +See a mosquito, smack, smack! + +At least you're out in the world. +You must meet girls. + +Mosquito girls try to trade up, +get with a moth, dragonfly. + +Mosquito girl don't want no mosquito. + +You got to be kidding me! + +Mooseblood's about to leave +the building! So long, bee! + +- Hey, guys! +- Mooseblood! + +I knew I'd catch y'all down here. +Did you bring your crazy straw? + +We throw it in jars, slap a label on it, +and it's pretty much pure profit. + +What is this place? + +A bee's got a brain +the size of a pinhead. + +They are pinheads! + +Pinhead. + +- Check out the new smoker. +- Oh, sweet. That's the one you want. + +The Thomas 3000! + +Smoker? + +Ninety puffs a minute, semi-automatic. +Twice the nicotine, all the tar. + +A couple breaths of this +knocks them right out. + +They make the honey, +and we make the money. + +"They make the honey, +and we make the money"? + +Oh, my! + +What's going on? Are you OK? + +Yeah. It doesn't last too long. + +Do you know you're +in a fake hive with fake walls? + +Our queen was moved here. +We had no choice. + +This is your queen? +That's a man in women's clothes! + +That's a drag queen! + +What is this? + +Oh, no! + +There's hundreds of them! + +Bee honey. + +Our honey is being brazenly stolen +on a massive scale! + +This is worse than anything bears +have done! I intend to do something. + +Oh, Barry, stop. + +Who told you humans are taking +our honey? That's a rumor. + +Do these look like rumors? + +That's a conspiracy theory. +These are obviously doctored photos. + +How did you get mixed up in this? + +He's been talking to humans. + +- What? +- Talking to humans?! + +He has a human girlfriend. +And they make out! + +Make out? Barry! + +We do not. + +- You wish you could. +- Whose side are you on? + +The bees! + +I dated a cricket once in San Antonio. +Those crazy legs kept me up all night. + +Barry, this is what you want +to do with your life? + +I want to do it for all our lives. +Nobody works harder than bees! + +Dad, I remember you +coming home so overworked + +your hands were still stirring. +You couldn't stop. + +I remember that. + +What right do they have to our honey? + +We live on two cups a year. They put it +in lip balm for no reason whatsoever! + +Even if it's true, what can one bee do? + +Sting them where it really hurts. + +In the face! The eye! + +- That would hurt. +- No. + +Up the nose? That's a killer. + +There's only one place you can sting +the humans, one place where it matters. + +Hive at Five, the hive's only +full-hour action news source. + +No more bee beards! + +With Bob Bumble at the anchor desk. + +Weather with Storm Stinger. + +Sports with Buzz Larvi. + +And Jeanette Chung. + +- Good evening. I'm Bob Bumble. +- And I'm Jeanette Chung. + +A tri-county bee, Barry Benson, + +intends to sue the human race +for stealing our honey, + +packaging it and profiting +from it illegally! + +Tomorrow night on Bee Larry King, + +we'll have three former queens here in +our studio, discussing their new book, + +Classy Ladies, +out this week on Hexagon. + +Tonight we're talking to Barry Benson. + +Did you ever think, "I'm a kid +from the hive. I can't do this"? + +Bees have never been afraid +to change the world. + +What about Bee Columbus? +Bee Gandhi? Bejesus? + +Where I'm from, we'd never sue humans. + +We were thinking +of stickball or candy stores. + +How old are you? + +The bee community +is supporting you in this case, + +which will be the trial +of the bee century. + +You know, they have a Larry King +in the human world too. + +It's a common name. Next week... + +He looks like you and has a show +and suspenders and colored dots... + +Next week... + +Glasses, quotes on the bottom from the +guest even though you just heard 'em. + +Bear Week next week! +They're scary, hairy and here live. + +Always leans forward, pointy shoulders, +squinty eyes, very Jewish. + +In tennis, you attack +at the point of weakness! + +It was my grandmother, Ken. She's 81. + +Honey, her backhand's a joke! +I'm not gonna take advantage of that? + +Quiet, please. +Actual work going on here. + +- Is that that same bee? +- Yes, it is! + +I'm helping him sue the human race. + +- Hello. +- Hello, bee. + +This is Ken. + +Yeah, I remember you. Timberland, size +ten and a half. Vibram sole, I believe. + +Why does he talk again? + +Listen, you better go +'cause we're really busy working. + +But it's our yogurt night! + +Bye-bye. + +Why is yogurt night so difficult?! + +You poor thing. +You two have been at this for hours! + +Yes, and Adam here +has been a huge help. + +- Frosting... +- How many sugars? + +Just one. I try not +to use the competition. + +So why are you helping me? + +Bees have good qualities. + +And it takes my mind off the shop. + +Instead of flowers, people +are giving balloon bouquets now. + +Those are great, if you're three. + +And artificial flowers. + +- Oh, those just get me psychotic! +- Yeah, me too. + +Bent stingers, pointless pollination. + +Bees must hate those fake things! + +Nothing worse +than a daffodil that's had work done. + +Maybe this could make up +for it a little bit. + +- This lawsuit's a pretty big deal. +- I guess. + +You sure you want to go through with it? + +Am I sure? When I'm done with +the humans, they won't be able + +to say, "Honey, I'm home," +without paying a royalty! + +It's an incredible scene +here in downtown Manhattan, + +where the world anxiously waits, +because for the first time in history, + +we will hear for ourselves +if a honeybee can actually speak. + +What have we gotten into here, Barry? + +It's pretty big, isn't it? + +I can't believe how many humans +don't work during the day. + +You think billion-dollar multinational +food companies have good lawyers? + +Everybody needs to stay +behind the barricade. + +- What's the matter? +- I don't know, I just got a chill. + +Well, if it isn't the bee team. + +You boys work on this? + +All rise! The Honorable +Judge Bumbleton presiding. + +All right. Case number 4475, + +Superior Court of New York, +Barry Bee Benson v. the Honey Industry + +is now in session. + +Mr. Montgomery, you're representing +the five food companies collectively? + +A privilege. + +Mr. Benson... you're representing +all the bees of the world? + +I'm kidding. Yes, Your Honor, +we're ready to proceed. + +Mr. Montgomery, +your opening statement, please. + +Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, + +my grandmother was a simple woman. + +Born on a farm, she believed +it was man's divine right + +to benefit from the bounty +of nature God put before us. + +If we lived in the topsy-turvy world +Mr. Benson imagines, + +just think of what would it mean. + +I would have to negotiate +with the silkworm + +for the elastic in my britches! + +Talking bee! + +How do we know this isn't some sort of + +holographic motion-picture-capture +Hollywood wizardry? + +They could be using laser beams! + +Robotics! Ventriloquism! +Cloning! For all we know, + +he could be on steroids! + +Mr. Benson? + +Ladies and gentlemen, +there's no trickery here. + +I'm just an ordinary bee. +Honey's pretty important to me. + +It's important to all bees. +We invented it! + +We make it. And we protect it +with our lives. + +Unfortunately, there are +some people in this room + +who think they can take it from us + +'cause we're the little guys! +I'm hoping that, after this is all over, + +you'll see how, by taking our honey, +you not only take everything we have + +but everything we are! + +I wish he'd dress like that +all the time. So nice! + +Call your first witness. + +So, Mr. Klauss Vanderhayden +of Honey Farms, big company you have. + +I suppose so. + +I see you also own +Honeyburton and Honron! + +Yes, they provide beekeepers +for our farms. + +Beekeeper. I find that +to be a very disturbing term. + +I don't imagine you employ +any bee-free-ers, do you? + +- No. +- I couldn't hear you. + +- No. +- No. + +Because you don't free bees. +You keep bees. Not only that, + +it seems you thought a bear would be +an appropriate image for a jar of honey. + +They're very lovable creatures. + +Yogi Bear, Fozzie Bear, Build-A-Bear. + +You mean like this? + +Bears kill bees! + +How'd you like his head crashing +through your living room?! + +Biting into your couch! +Spitting out your throw pillows! + +OK, that's enough. Take him away. + +So, Mr. Sting, thank you for being here. +Your name intrigues me. + +- Where have I heard it before? +- I was with a band called The Police. + +But you've never been +a police officer, have you? + +No, I haven't. + +No, you haven't. And so here +we have yet another example + +of bee culture casually +stolen by a human + +for nothing more than +a prance-about stage name. + +Oh, please. + +Have you ever been stung, Mr. Sting? + +Because I'm feeling +a little stung, Sting. + +Or should I say... Mr. Gordon M. Sumner! + +That's not his real name?! You idiots! + +Mr. Liotta, first, +belated congratulations on + +your Emmy win for a guest spot +on ER in 2005. + +Thank you. Thank you. + +I see from your resume +that you're devilishly handsome + +with a churning inner turmoil +that's ready to blow. + +I enjoy what I do. Is that a crime? + +Not yet it isn't. But is this +what it's come to for you? + +Exploiting tiny, helpless bees +so you don't + +have to rehearse +your part and learn your lines, sir? + +Watch it, Benson! +I could blow right now! + +This isn't a goodfella. +This is a badfella! + +Why doesn't someone just step on +this creep, and we can all go home?! + +- Order in this court! +- You're all thinking it! + +Order! Order, I say! + +- Say it! +- Mr. Liotta, please sit down! + +I think it was awfully nice +of that bear to pitch in like that. + +I think the jury's on our side. + +Are we doing everything right, legally? + +I'm a florist. + +Right. Well, here's to a great team. + +To a great team! + +Well, hello. + +- Ken! +- Hello. + +I didn't think you were coming. + +No, I was just late. +I tried to call, but... the battery. + +I didn't want all this to go to waste, +so I called Barry. Luckily, he was free. + +Oh, that was lucky. + +There's a little left. +I could heat it up. + +Yeah, heat it up, sure, whatever. + +So I hear you're quite a tennis player. + +I'm not much for the game myself. +The ball's a little grabby. + +That's where I usually sit. +Right... there. + +Ken, Barry was looking at your resume, + +and he agreed with me that eating with +chopsticks isn't really a special skill. + +You think I don't see what you're doing? + +I know how hard it is to find +the rightjob. We have that in common. + +Do we? + +Bees have 100 percent employment, +but we do jobs like taking the crud out. + +That's just what +I was thinking about doing. + +Ken, I let Barry borrow your razor +for his fuzz. I hope that was all right. + +I'm going to drain the old stinger. + +Yeah, you do that. + +Look at that. + +You know, I've just about had it + +with your little mind games. + +- What's that? +- Italian Vogue. + +Mamma mia, that's a lot of pages. + +A lot of ads. + +Remember what Van said, why is +your life more valuable than mine? + +Funny, I just can't seem to recall that! + +I think something stinks in here! + +I love the smell of flowers. + +How do you like the smell of flames?! + +Not as much. + +Water bug! Not taking sides! + +Ken, I'm wearing a Chapstick hat! +This is pathetic! + +I've got issues! + +Well, well, well, a royal flush! + +- You're bluffing. +- Am I? + +Surf's up, dude! + +Poo water! + +That bowl is gnarly. + +Except for those dirty yellow rings! + +Kenneth! What are you doing?! + +You know, I don't even like honey! +I don't eat it! + +We need to talk! + +He's just a little bee! + +And he happens to be +the nicest bee I've met in a long time! + +Long time? What are you talking about?! +Are there other bugs in your life? + +No, but there are other things bugging +me in life. And you're one of them! + +Fine! Talking bees, no yogurt night... + +My nerves are fried from riding +on this emotional roller coaster! + +Goodbye, Ken. + +And for your information, + +I prefer sugar-free, artificial +sweeteners made by man! + +I'm sorry about all that. + +I know it's got +an aftertaste! I like it! + +I always felt there was some kind +of barrier between Ken and me. + +I couldn't overcome it. +Oh, well. + +Are you OK for the trial? + +I believe Mr. Montgomery +is about out of ideas. + +We would like to call +Mr. Barry Benson Bee to the stand. + +Good idea! You can really see why he's +considered one of the best lawyers... + +Yeah. + +Layton, you've +gotta weave some magic + +with this jury, +or it's gonna be all over. + +Don't worry. The only thing I have +to do to turn this jury around + +is to remind them +of what they don't like about bees. + +- You got the tweezers? +- Are you allergic? + +Only to losing, son. Only to losing. + +Mr. Benson Bee, I'll ask you +what I think we'd all like to know. + +What exactly is your relationship + +to that woman? + +We're friends. + +- Good friends? +- Yes. + +How good? Do you live together? + +Wait a minute... + +Are you her little... + +...bedbug? + +I've seen a bee documentary or two. +From what I understand, + +doesn't your queen give birth +to all the bee children? + +- Yeah, but... +- So those aren't your real parents! + +- Oh, Barry... +- Yes, they are! + +Hold me back! + +You're an illegitimate bee, +aren't you, Benson? + +He's denouncing bees! + +Don't y'all date your cousins? + +- Objection! +- I'm going to pincushion this guy! + +Adam, don't! It's what he wants! + +Oh, I'm hit!! + +Oh, lordy, I am hit! + +Order! Order! + +The venom! The venom +is coursing through my veins! + +I have been felled +by a winged beast of destruction! + +You see? You can't treat them +like equals! They're striped savages! + +Stinging's the only thing +they know! It's their way! + +- Adam, stay with me. +- I can't feel my legs. + +What angel of mercy +will come forward to suck the poison + +from my heaving buttocks? + +I will have order in this court. Order! + +Order, please! + +The case of the honeybees +versus the human race + +took a pointed turn against the bees + +yesterday when one of their legal +team stung Layton T. Montgomery. + +- Hey, buddy. +- Hey. + +- Is there much pain? +- Yeah. + +I... + +I blew the whole case, didn't I? + +It doesn't matter. What matters is +you're alive. You could have died. + +I'd be better off dead. Look at me. + +They got it from the cafeteria +downstairs, in a tuna sandwich. + +Look, there's +a little celery still on it. + +What was it like to sting someone? + +I can't explain it. It was all... + +All adrenaline and then... +and then ecstasy! + +All right. + +You think it was all a trap? + +Of course. I'm sorry. +I flew us right into this. + +What were we thinking? Look at us. We're +just a couple of bugs in this world. + +What will the humans do to us +if they win? + +I don't know. + +I hear they put the roaches in motels. +That doesn't sound so bad. + +Adam, they check in, +but they don't check out! + +Oh, my. + +Could you get a nurse +to close that window? + +- Why? +- The smoke. + +Bees don't smoke. + +Right. Bees don't smoke. + +Bees don't smoke! +But some bees are smoking. + +That's it! That's our case! + +It is? It's not over? + +Get dressed. I've gotta go somewhere. + +Get back to the court and stall. +Stall any way you can. + +And assuming you've done step correctly, you're ready for the tub. + +Mr. Flayman. + +Yes? Yes, Your Honor! + +Where is the rest of your team? + +Well, Your Honor, it's interesting. + +Bees are trained to fly haphazardly, + +and as a result, +we don't make very good time. + +I actually heard a funny story about... + +Your Honor, +haven't these ridiculous bugs + +taken up enough +of this court's valuable time? + +How much longer will we allow +these absurd shenanigans to go on? + +They have presented no compelling +evidence to support their charges + +against my clients, +who run legitimate businesses. + +I move for a complete dismissal +of this entire case! + +Mr. Flayman, I'm afraid I'm going + +to have to consider +Mr. Montgomery's motion. + +But you can't! We have a terrific case. + +Where is your proof? +Where is the evidence? + +Show me the smoking gun! + +Hold it, Your Honor! +You want a smoking gun? + +Here is your smoking gun. + +What is that? + +It's a bee smoker! + +What, this? +This harmless little contraption? + +This couldn't hurt a fly, +let alone a bee. + +Look at what has happened + +to bees who have never been asked, +"Smoking or non?" + +Is this what nature intended for us? + +To be forcibly addicted +to smoke machines + +and man-made wooden slat work camps? + +Living out our lives as honey slaves +to the white man? + +- What are we gonna do? +- He's playing the species card. + +Ladies and gentlemen, please, +free these bees! + +Free the bees! Free the bees! + +Free the bees! + +Free the bees! Free the bees! + +The court finds in favor of the bees! + +Vanessa, we won! + +I knew you could do it! High-five! + +Sorry. + +I'm OK! You know what this means? + +All the honey +will finally belong to the bees. + +Now we won't have +to work so hard all the time. + +This is an unholy perversion +of the balance of nature, Benson. + +You'll regret this. + +Barry, how much honey is out there? + +All right. One at a time. + +Barry, who are you wearing? + +My sweater is Ralph Lauren, +and I have no pants. + +- What if Montgomery's right? +- What do you mean? + +We've been living the bee way +a long time, 27 million years. + +Congratulations on your victory. +What will you demand as a settlement? + +First, we'll demand a complete shutdown +of all bee work camps. + +Then we want back the honey +that was ours to begin with, + +every last drop. + +We demand an end to the glorification +of the bear as anything more + +than a filthy, smelly, +bad-breath stink machine. + +We're all aware +of what they do in the woods. + +Wait for my signal. + +Take him out. + +He'll have nauseous +for a few hours, then he'll be fine. + +And we will no longer tolerate +bee-negative nicknames... + +But it's just a prance-about stage name! + +...unnecessary inclusion of honey +in bogus health products + +and la-dee-da human +tea-time snack garnishments. + +Can't breathe. + +Bring it in, boys! + +Hold it right there! Good. + +Tap it. + +Mr. Buzzwell, we just passed three cups, +and there's gallons more coming! + +- I think we need to shut down! +- Shut down? We've never shut down. + +Shut down honey production! + +Stop making honey! + +Turn your key, sir! + +What do we do now? + +Cannonball! + +We're shutting honey production! + +Mission abort. + +Aborting pollination and nectar detail. +Returning to base. + +Adam, you wouldn't believe +how much honey was out there. + +Oh, yeah? + +What's going on? Where is everybody? + +- Are they out celebrating? +- They're home. + +They don't know what to do. +Laying out, sleeping in. + +I heard your Uncle Carl was on his way +to San Antonio with a cricket. + +At least we got our honey back. + +Sometimes I think, so what if humans +liked our honey? Who wouldn't? + +It's the greatest thing in the world! +I was excited to be part of making it. + +This was my new desk. This was my +new job. I wanted to do it really well. + +And now... + +Now I can't. + +I don't understand +why they're not happy. + +I thought their lives would be better! + +They're doing nothing. It's amazing. +Honey really changes people. + +You don't have any idea +what's going on, do you? + +- What did you want to show me? +- This. + +What happened here? + +That is not the half of it. + +Oh, no. Oh, my. + +They're all wilting. + +Doesn't look very good, does it? + +No. + +And whose fault do you think that is? + +You know, I'm gonna guess bees. + +Bees? + +Specifically, me. + +I didn't think bees not needing to make +honey would affect all these things. + +It's notjust flowers. +Fruits, vegetables, they all need bees. + +That's our whole SAT test right there. + +Take away produce, that affects +the entire animal kingdom. + +And then, of course... + +The human species? + +So if there's no more pollination, + +it could all just go south here, +couldn't it? + +I know this is also partly my fault. + +How about a suicide pact? + +How do we do it? + +- I'll sting you, you step on me. +- Thatjust kills you twice. + +Right, right. + +Listen, Barry... +sorry, but I gotta get going. + +I had to open my mouth and talk. + +Vanessa? + +Vanessa? Why are you leaving? +Where are you going? + +To the final Tournament of Roses parade +in Pasadena. + +They've moved it to this weekend +because all the flowers are dying. + +It's the last chance +I'll ever have to see it. + +Vanessa, I just wanna say I'm sorry. +I never meant it to turn out like this. + +I know. Me neither. + +Tournament of Roses. +Roses can't do sports. + +Wait a minute. Roses. Roses? + +Roses! + +Vanessa! + +Roses?! + +Barry? + +- Roses are flowers! +- Yes, they are. + +Flowers, bees, pollen! + +I know. +That's why this is the last parade. + +Maybe not. +Could you ask him to slow down? + +Could you slow down? + +Barry! + +OK, I made a huge mistake. +This is a total disaster, all my fault. + +Yes, it kind of is. + +I've ruined the planet. +I wanted to help you + +with the flower shop. +I've made it worse. + +Actually, it's completely closed down. + +I thought maybe you were remodeling. + +But I have another idea, and it's +greater than my previous ideas combined. + +I don't want to hear it! + +All right, they have the roses, +the roses have the pollen. + +I know every bee, plant +and flower bud in this park. + +All we gotta do is get what they've got +back here with what we've got. + +- Bees. +- Park. + +- Pollen! +- Flowers. + +- Repollination! +- Across the nation! + +Tournament of Roses, +Pasadena, California. + +They've got nothing +but flowers, floats and cotton candy. + +Security will be tight. + +I have an idea. + +Vanessa Bloome, FTD. + +Official floral business. It's real. + +Sorry, ma'am. Nice brooch. + +Thank you. It was a gift. + +Once inside, +we just pick the right float. + +How about The Princess and the Pea? + +I could be the princess, +and you could be the pea! + +Yes, I got it. + +- Where should I sit? +- What are you? + +- I believe I'm the pea. +- The pea? + +It goes under the mattresses. + +- Not in this fairy tale, sweetheart. +- I'm getting the marshal. + +You do that! +This whole parade is a fiasco! + +Let's see what this baby'll do. + +Hey, what are you doing?! + +Then all we do +is blend in with traffic... + +...without arousing suspicion. + +Once at the airport, +there's no stopping us. + +Stop! Security. + +- You and your insect pack your float? +- Yes. + +Has it been +in your possession the entire time? + +Would you remove your shoes? + +- Remove your stinger. +- It's part of me. + +I know. Just having some fun. +Enjoy your flight. + +Then if we're lucky, we'll have +just enough pollen to do the job. + +Can you believe how lucky we are? We +have just enough pollen to do the job! + +I think this is gonna work. + +It's got to work. + +Attention, passengers, +this is Captain Scott. + +We have a bit of bad weather +in New York. + +It looks like we'll experience +a couple hours delay. + +Barry, these are cut flowers +with no water. They'll never make it. + +I gotta get up there +and talk to them. + +Be careful. + +Can I get help +with the Sky Mall magazine? + +I'd like to order the talking +inflatable nose and ear hair trimmer. + +Captain, I'm in a real situation. + +- What'd you say, Hal? +- Nothing. + +Bee! + +Don't freak out! My entire species... + +What are you doing? + +- Wait a minute! I'm an attorney! +- Who's an attorney? + +Don't move. + +Oh, Barry. + +Good afternoon, passengers. +This is your captain. + +Would a Miss Vanessa Bloome in 24B +please report to the cockpit? + +And please hurry! + +What happened here? + +There was a DustBuster, +a toupee, a life raft exploded. + +One's bald, one's in a boat, +they're both unconscious! + +- Is that another bee joke? +- No! + +No one's flying the plane! + +This is JFK control tower, Flight 356. +What's your status? + +This is Vanessa Bloome. +I'm a florist from New York. + +Where's the pilot? + +He's unconscious, +and so is the copilot. + +Not good. Does anyone onboard +have flight experience? + +As a matter of fact, there is. + +- Who's that? +- Barry Benson. + +From the honey trial?! Oh, great. + +Vanessa, this is nothing more +than a big metal bee. + +It's got giant wings, huge engines. + +I can't fly a plane. + +- Why not? Isn't John Travolta a pilot? +- Yes. + +How hard could it be? + +Wait, Barry! +We're headed into some lightning. + +This is Bob Bumble. We have some +late-breaking news from JFK Airport, + +where a suspenseful scene +is developing. + +Barry Benson, +fresh from his legal victory... + +That's Barry! + +...is attempting to land a plane, +loaded with people, flowers + +and an incapacitated flight crew. + +Flowers?! + +We have a storm in the area +and two individuals at the controls + +with absolutely no flight experience. + +Just a minute. +There's a bee on that plane. + +I'm quite familiar with Mr. Benson +and his no-account compadres. + +They've done enough damage. + +But isn't he your only hope? + +Technically, a bee +shouldn't be able to fly at all. + +Their wings are too small... + +Haven't we heard this a million times? + +"The surface area of the wings +and body mass make no sense." + +- Get this on the air! +- Got it. + +- Stand by. +- We're going live. + +The way we work may be a mystery to you. + +Making honey takes a lot of bees +doing a lot of small jobs. + +But let me tell you about a small job. + +If you do it well, +it makes a big difference. + +More than we realized. +To us, to everyone. + +That's why I want to get bees +back to working together. + +That's the bee way! +We're not made of Jell-O. + +We get behind a fellow. + +- Black and yellow! +- Hello! + +Left, right, down, hover. + +- Hover? +- Forget hover. + +This isn't so hard. +Beep-beep! Beep-beep! + +Barry, what happened?! + +Wait, I think we were +on autopilot the whole time. + +- That may have been helping me. +- And now we're not! + +So it turns out I cannot fly a plane. + +All of you, let's get +behind this fellow! Move it out! + +Move out! + +Our only chance is if I do what I'd do, +you copy me with the wings of the plane! + +Don't have to yell. + +I'm not yelling! +We're in a lot of trouble. + +It's very hard to concentrate +with that panicky tone in your voice! + +It's not a tone. I'm panicking! + +I can't do this! + +Vanessa, pull yourself together. +You have to snap out of it! + +You snap out of it. + +You snap out of it. + +- You snap out of it! +- You snap out of it! + +- You snap out of it! +- You snap out of it! + +- You snap out of it! +- You snap out of it! + +- Hold it! +- Why? Come on, it's my turn. + +How is the plane flying? + +I don't know. + +Hello? + +Benson, got any flowers +for a happy occasion in there? + +The Pollen Jocks! + +They do get behind a fellow. + +- Black and yellow. +- Hello. + +All right, let's drop this tin can +on the blacktop. + +Where? I can't see anything. Can you? + +No, nothing. It's all cloudy. + +Come on. You got to think bee, Barry. + +- Thinking bee. +- Thinking bee. + +Thinking bee! +Thinking bee! Thinking bee! + +Wait a minute. +I think I'm feeling something. + +- What? +- I don't know. It's strong, pulling me. + +Like a 27-million-year-old instinct. + +Bring the nose down. + +Thinking bee! +Thinking bee! Thinking bee! + +- What in the world is on the tarmac? +- Get some lights on that! + +Thinking bee! +Thinking bee! Thinking bee! + +- Vanessa, aim for the flower. +- OK. + +Cut the engines. We're going in +on bee power. Ready, boys? + +Affirmative! + +Good. Good. Easy, now. That's it. + +Land on that flower! + +Ready? Full reverse! + +Spin it around! + +- Not that flower! The other one! +- Which one? + +- That flower. +- I'm aiming at the flower! + +That's a fat guy in a flowered shirt. +I mean the giant pulsating flower + +made of millions of bees! + +Pull forward. Nose down. Tail up. + +Rotate around it. + +- This is insane, Barry! +- This's the only way I know how to fly. + +Am I koo-koo-kachoo, or is this plane +flying in an insect-like pattern? + +Get your nose in there. Don't be afraid. +Smell it. Full reverse! + +Just drop it. Be a part of it. + +Aim for the center! + +Now drop it in! Drop it in, woman! + +Come on, already. + +Barry, we did it! +You taught me how to fly! + +- Yes. No high-five! +- Right. + +Barry, it worked! +Did you see the giant flower? + +What giant flower? Where? Of course +I saw the flower! That was genius! + +- Thank you. +- But we're not done yet. + +Listen, everyone! + +This runway is covered +with the last pollen + +from the last flowers +available anywhere on Earth. + +That means this is our last chance. + +We're the only ones who make honey, +pollinate flowers and dress like this. + +If we're gonna survive as a species, +this is our moment! What do you say? + +Are we going to be bees, orjust +Museum of Natural History keychains? + +We're bees! + +Keychain! + +Then follow me! Except Keychain. + +Hold on, Barry. Here. + +You've earned this. + +Yeah! + +I'm a Pollen Jock! And it's a perfect +fit. All I gotta do are the sleeves. + +Oh, yeah. + +That's our Barry. + +Mom! The bees are back! + +If anybody needs +to make a call, now's the time. + +I got a feeling we'll be +working late tonight! + +Here's your change. Have a great +afternoon! Can I help who's next? + +Would you like some honey with that? +It is bee-approved. Don't forget these. + +Milk, cream, cheese, it's all me. +And I don't see a nickel! + +Sometimes I just feel +like a piece of meat! + +I had no idea. + +Barry, I'm sorry. +Have you got a moment? + +Would you excuse me? +My mosquito associate will help you. + +Sorry I'm late. + +He's a lawyer too? + +I was already a blood-sucking parasite. +All I needed was a briefcase. + +Have a great afternoon! + +Barry, I just got this huge tulip order, +and I can't get them anywhere. + +No problem, Vannie. +Just leave it to me. + +You're a lifesaver, Barry. +Can I help who's next? + +All right, scramble, jocks! +It's time to fly. + +Thank you, Barry! + +That bee is living my life! + +Let it go, Kenny. + +- When will this nightmare end?! +- Let it all go. + +- Beautiful day to fly. +- Sure is. + +Between you and me, +I was dying to get out of that office. + +You have got +to start thinking bee, my friend. + +- Thinking bee! +- Me? + +Hold it. Let's just stop +for a second. Hold it. + +I'm sorry. I'm sorry, everyone. +Can we stop here? + +I'm not making a major life decision +during a production number! + +All right. Take ten, everybody. +Wrap it up, guys. + +I had virtually no rehearsal for that. diff --git a/gatsby.txt b/gatsby.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..614ffc5 --- /dev/null +++ b/gatsby.txt @@ -0,0 +1,6333 @@ +Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; + If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, +Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, + I must have you!" + + --THOMAS PARKE D'INVILLIERS + + + + + +Chapter 1 + + + +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 today. + +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 center 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 Hôtel 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 eye-sore, but it was a +small eye-sore, 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 off shore. + +"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. Tomorrow!" Then she added +irrelevantly, "You ought to see the baby." + +"I'd like to." + +"She's asleep. She's two 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 grey 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 Coloured 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 tonight." + +"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 skepticism 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 tomorrow," 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. + + + + +Chapter 2 + + + +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 grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives +out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey +men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud +which screens their obscure operations from your sight. + +But above the grey 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 retinas 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 white-washed 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 blonde, 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 +crepe-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 grey, 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. Upstairs, in the solemn echoing drive +she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, +lavender-colored with grey 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 grey 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 drug store 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 eyebrows 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 everyone 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 appendicitus 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 downstairs." + +"Two what?" demanded Tom. + +"Two studies. One of them I call 'Montauk Point--the Gulls,' and the +other I call 'Montauk Point--the Sea.' " + +The sister Catherine sat down beside me on the couch. + +"Do you live down on Long Island, too?" she 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 +eastward 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 tomorrow. I'm going to +make a list of all the things I've got to get. A massage and a wave +and a collar for the dog and one of those cute little 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 bathroom 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. + + + + +Chapter 3 + + + +There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In +his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the +whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the +afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft or +taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats +slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of +foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties +to and from the city, between nine in the morning and long past +midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to +meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants including an extra +gardener toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers +and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before. + +Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer +in New York--every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back +door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the +kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an +hour, if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's +thumb. + +At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several +hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas +tree of Gatsby's enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with +glistening hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of +harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. +In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked +with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of +his female guests were too young to know one from another. + +By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived--no thin five-piece affair +but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and +cornets and piccolos and low and high drums. The last swimmers have +come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from +New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and +salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors and hair shorn in +strange new ways and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The +bar is in full swing and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the +garden outside until the air is alive with chatter and laughter and +casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot and +enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names. + +The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun and +now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music and the opera of +voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier, minute by minute, +spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups +change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the +same breath--already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave +here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, +joyous moment the center of a group and then excited with triumph +glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the +constantly changing light. + +Suddenly one of these gypsies in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out +of the air, dumps it down for courage and moving her hands like +Frisco dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the +orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her and there is a +burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda +Gray's understudy from the "Follies." The party has begun. + +I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby's house I was one of +the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not +invited--they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out +to Long Island and somehow they ended up at Gatsby's door. Once there +they were introduced by somebody who knew Gatsby and after that they +conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with +amusement parks. Sometimes they came and went without having met Gatsby +at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its own +ticket of admission. + +I had been actually invited. A chauffeur in a uniform of robin's egg +blue crossed my lawn early that Saturday morning with a surprisingly +formal note from his employer--the honor would be entirely Gatsby's, it +said, if I would attend his "little party" that night. He had +seen me several times and had intended to call on me long before +but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it--signed +Jay Gatsby in a majestic hand. + +Dressed up in white flannels I went over to his lawn a little after +seven and wandered around rather ill-at-ease among swirls and eddies +of people I didn't know--though here and there was a face I had noticed +on the commuting train. I was immediately struck by the number of young +Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry +and all talking in low earnest voices to solid and prosperous +Americans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or +insurance or automobiles. They were, at least, agonizingly aware of the +easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few +words in the right key. + +As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host but the two or +three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an +amazed way and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements +that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table--the only place +in the garden where a single man could linger without looking +purposeless and alone. + +I was on my way to get roaring drunk from sheer embarrassment when +Jordan Baker came out of the house and stood at the head of the marble +steps, leaning a little backward and looking with contemptuous interest +down into the garden. + +Welcome or not, I found it necessary to attach myself to someone +before I should begin to address cordial remarks to the passers-by. + +"Hello!" I roared, advancing toward her. My voice seemed unnaturally +loud across the garden. + +"I thought you might be here," she responded absently as I came up. +"I remembered you lived next door to----" + +She held my hand impersonally, as a promise that she'd take care +of me in a minute, and gave ear to two girls in twin yellow dresses +who stopped at the foot of the steps. + +"Hello!" they cried together. "Sorry you didn't win." + +That was for the golf tournament. She had lost in the finals the week +before. + +"You don't know who we are," said one of the girls in yellow, "but we +met you here about a month ago." + +"You've dyed your hair since then," remarked Jordan, and I started +but the girls had moved casually on and her remark was addressed to the +premature moon, produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a caterer's +basket. With Jordan's slender golden arm resting in mine we descended +the steps and sauntered about the garden. A tray of cocktails floated at +us through the twilight and we sat down at a table with the two girls in +yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble. + +"Do you come to these parties often?" inquired Jordan of the girl +beside her. + +"The last one was the one I met you at," answered the girl, in an alert, +confident voice. She turned to her companion: "Wasn't it for you, +Lucille?" + +It was for Lucille, too. + +"I like to come," Lucille said. "I never care what I do, so I always have +a good time. When I was here last I tore my gown on a chair, and he asked +me my name and address--inside of a week I got a package from Croirier's +with a new evening gown in it." + +"Did you keep it?" asked Jordan. + +"Sure I did. I was going to wear it tonight, but it was too big in the +bust and had to be altered. It was gas blue with lavender beads. Two +hundred and sixty-five dollars." + +"There's something funny about a fellow that'll do a thing like that," +said the other girl eagerly. "He doesn't want any trouble with ANYbody." + +"Who doesn't?" I inquired. + +"Gatsby. Somebody told me----" + +The two girls and Jordan leaned together confidentially. + +"Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once." + +A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and +listened eagerly. + +"I don't think it's so much THAT," argued Lucille skeptically; "it's +more that he was a German spy during the war." + +One of the men nodded in confirmation. + +"I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in +Germany," he assured us positively. + +"Oh, no," said the first girl, "it couldn't be that, because he was in +the American army during the war." As our credulity switched back to +her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. "You look at him sometimes when +he thinks nobody's looking at him. I'll bet he killed a man." + +She narrowed her eyes and shivered. Lucille shivered. We all turned and +looked around for Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic speculation he +inspired that there were whispers about him from those who found little +that it was necessary to whisper about in this world. + +The first supper--there would be another one after midnight--was now +being served, and Jordan invited me to join her own party who were +spread around a table on the other side of the garden. There were +three married couples and Jordan's escort, a persistent undergraduate +given to violent innuendo and obviously under the impression +that sooner or later Jordan was going to yield him up her person +to a greater or lesser degree. Instead of rambling this party +had preserved a dignified homogeneity, and assumed to itself the +function of representing the staid nobility of the countryside--East +Egg condescending to West Egg, and carefully on guard against its +spectroscopic gayety. + +"Let's get out," whispered Jordan, after a somehow wasteful and +inappropriate half hour. "This is much too polite for me." + +We got up, and she explained that we were going to find the host--I +had never met him, she said, and it was making me uneasy. The +undergraduate nodded in a cynical, melancholy way. + +The bar, where we glanced first, was crowded but Gatsby was not there. +She couldn't find him from the top of the steps, and he wasn't on the +veranda. On a chance we tried an important-looking door, and walked +into a high Gothic library, panelled with carved English oak, and +probably transported complete from some ruin overseas. + +A stout, middle-aged man with enormous owl-eyed spectacles was +sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with +unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he +wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot. + +"What do you think?" he demanded impetuously. + +"About what?" + +He waved his hand toward the book-shelves. + +"About that. As a matter of fact you needn't bother to ascertain. I +ascertained. They're real." + +"The books?" + +He nodded. + +"Absolutely real--have pages and everything. I thought they'd be a nice +durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they're absolutely real. Pages +and--Here! Lemme show you." + +Taking our skepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and +returned with Volume One of the "Stoddard Lectures." + +"See!" he cried triumphantly. "It's a bona fide piece of printed matter. +It fooled me. This fella's a regular Belasco. It's a triumph. What +thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop too--didn't cut the pages. +But what do you want? What do you expect?" + +He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf +muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable +to collapse. + +"Who brought you?" he demanded. "Or did you just come? I was brought. +Most people were brought." + +Jordan looked at him alertly, cheerfully without answering. + +"I was brought by a woman named Roosevelt," he continued. "Mrs. Claud +Roosevelt. Do you know her? I met her somewhere last night. I've +been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me +up to sit in a library." + +"Has it?" + +"A little bit, I think. I can't tell yet. I've only been here +an hour. Did I tell you about the books? They're real. They're----" + +"You told us." + +We shook hands with him gravely and went back outdoors. + +There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden, old men pushing +young girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior couples +holding each other tortuously, fashionably and keeping in the +corners--and a great number of single girls dancing individualistically +or relieving the orchestra for a moment of the burden of the banjo or +the traps. By midnight the hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor had +sung in Italian and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz and between +the numbers people were doing "stunts" all over the garden, while happy +vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky. A pair of stage +"twins"--who turned out to be the girls in yellow--did a baby act in +costume and champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger bowls. +The moon had risen higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of +silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the +banjoes on the lawn. + +I was still with Jordan Baker. We were sitting at a table with a man of +about my age and a rowdy little girl who gave way upon the slightest +provocation to uncontrollable laughter. I was enjoying myself now. I +had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed +before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound. + +At a lull in the entertainment the man looked at me and smiled. + +"Your face is familiar," he said, politely. "Weren't you in the Third +Division during the war?" + +"Why, yes. I was in the Ninth Machine-Gun Battalion." + +"I was in the Seventh Infantry until June nineteen-eighteen. I knew I'd +seen you somewhere before." + +We talked for a moment about some wet, grey little villages in France. +Evidently he lived in this vicinity for he told me that he had just +bought a hydroplane and was going to try it out in the morning. + +"Want to go with me, old sport? Just near the shore along the Sound." + +"What time?" + +"Any time that suits you best." + +It was on the tip of my tongue to ask his name when Jordan looked around +and smiled. + +"Having a gay time now?" she inquired. + +"Much better." I turned again to my new acquaintance. "This is an unusual +party for me. I haven't even seen the host. I live over there----" I waved +my hand at the invisible hedge in the distance, "and this man Gatsby sent +over his chauffeur with an invitation." + +For a moment he looked at me as if he failed to understand. + +"I'm Gatsby," he said suddenly. + +"What!" I exclaimed. "Oh, I beg your pardon." + +"I thought you knew, old sport. I'm afraid I'm not a very good host." + +He smiled understandingly--much more than understandingly. It was +one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance +in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or +seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then +concentrated on YOU with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It +understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in +you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it +had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to +convey. Precisely at that point it vanished--and I was looking at an +elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate +formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he +introduced himself I'd got a strong impression that he was picking his +words with care. + +Almost at the moment when Mr. Gatsby identified himself a butler +hurried toward him with the information that Chicago was calling him on +the wire. He excused himself with a small bow that included each of us +in turn. + +"If you want anything just ask for it, old sport," he urged me. +"Excuse me. I will rejoin you later." + +When he was gone I turned immediately to Jordan--constrained to assure her +of my surprise. I had expected that Mr. Gatsby would be a florid and +corpulent person in his middle years. + +"Who is he?" I demanded. "Do you know?" + +"He's just a man named Gatsby." + +"Where is he from, I mean? And what does he do?" + +"Now YOU're started on the subject," she answered with a wan smile. +"Well,--he told me once he was an Oxford man." + +A dim background started to take shape behind him but at her +next remark it faded away. + +"However, I don't believe it." + +"Why not?" + +"I don't know," she insisted, "I just don't think he went there." + +Something in her tone reminded me of the other girl's "I think +he killed a man," and had the effect of stimulating my curiosity. I +would have accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang +from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York. +That was comprehensible. But young men didn't--at least in my provincial +inexperience I believed they didn't--drift coolly out of nowhere and buy +a palace on Long Island Sound. + +"Anyhow he gives large parties," said Jordan, changing the subject +with an urbane distaste for the concrete. "And I like large parties. +They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy." + +There was the boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the orchestra leader +rang out suddenly above the echolalia of the garden. + +"Ladies and gentlemen," he cried. "At the request of Mr. Gatsby we are +going to play for you Mr. Vladimir Tostoff's latest work which attracted +so much attention at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the papers +you know there was a big sensation." He smiled with jovial condescension +and added "Some sensation!" whereupon everybody laughed. + +"The piece is known," he concluded lustily, "as 'Vladimir Tostoff's +Jazz History of the World.' " + +The nature of Mr. Tostoff's composition eluded me, because just as +it began my eyes fell on Gatsby, standing alone on the marble steps +and looking from one group to another with approving eyes. +His tanned skin was drawn attractively tight on his face and +his short hair looked as though it were trimmed every day. I could +see nothing sinister about him. I wondered if the fact that he was +not drinking helped to set him off from his guests, for it seemed +to me that he grew more correct as the fraternal hilarity increased. +When the "Jazz History of the World" was over girls were putting +their heads on men's shoulders in a puppyish, convivial way, girls were +swooning backward playfully into men's arms, even into groups knowing +that some one would arrest their falls--but no one swooned backward on +Gatsby and no French bob touched Gatsby's shoulder and no singing +quartets were formed with Gatsby's head for one link. + +"I beg your pardon." + +Gatsby's butler was suddenly standing beside us. + +"Miss Baker?" he inquired. "I beg your pardon but Mr. Gatsby would like +to speak to you alone." + +"With me?" she exclaimed in surprise. + +"Yes, madame." + +She got up slowly, raising her eyebrows at me in astonishment, +and followed the butler toward the house. I noticed that she wore +her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes--there +was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to +walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings. + +I was alone and it was almost two. For some time confused and +intriguing sounds had issued from a long many-windowed room which +overhung the terrace. Eluding Jordan's undergraduate who was now +engaged in an obstetrical conversation with two chorus girls, and who +implored me to join him, I went inside. + +The large room was full of people. One of the girls in yellow was +playing the piano and beside her stood a tall, red haired young lady +from a famous chorus, engaged in song. She had drunk a quantity of +champagne and during the course of her song she had decided ineptly +that everything was very very sad--she was not only singing, she was +weeping too. Whenever there was a pause in the song she filled it with +gasping broken sobs and then took up the lyric again in a quavering +soprano. The tears coursed down her cheeks--not freely, however, for when +they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an +inky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets. A +humorous suggestion was made that she sing the notes on her face +whereupon she threw up her hands, sank into a chair and went off into +a deep vinous sleep. + +"She had a fight with a man who says he's her husband," explained a +girl at my elbow. + +I looked around. Most of the remaining women were now having fights +with men said to be their husbands. Even Jordan's party, the quartet +from East Egg, were rent asunder by dissension. One of the men was +talking with curious intensity to a young actress, and his wife after +attempting to laugh at the situation in a dignified and indifferent +way broke down entirely and resorted to flank attacks--at intervals she +appeared suddenly at his side like an angry diamond, and hissed "You +promised!" into his ear. + +The reluctance to go home was not confined to wayward men. The hall was at +present occupied by two deplorably sober men and their highly indignant +wives. The wives were sympathizing with each other in slightly raised +voices. + +"Whenever he sees I'm having a good time he wants to go home." + +"Never heard anything so selfish in my life." + +"We're always the first ones to leave." + +"So are we." + +"Well, we're almost the last tonight," said one of the men sheepishly. +"The orchestra left half an hour ago." + +In spite of the wives' agreement that such malevolence was beyond +credibility, the dispute ended in a short struggle, and both wives were +lifted kicking into the night. + +As I waited for my hat in the hall the door of the library opened and +Jordan Baker and Gatsby came out together. He was saying some last word +to her but the eagerness in his manner tightened abruptly into +formality as several people approached him to say goodbye. + +Jordan's party were calling impatiently to her from the porch but she +lingered for a moment to shake hands. + +"I've just heard the most amazing thing," she whispered. "How long were +we in there?" + +"Why,--about an hour." + +"It was--simply amazing," she repeated abstractedly. "But I swore +I wouldn't tell it and here I am tantalizing you." She yawned +gracefully in my face. "Please come and see me. . . . Phone book. +. . . Under the name of Mrs. Sigourney Howard. . . . My aunt. . . ." +She was hurrying off as she talked--her brown hand waved a +jaunty salute as she melted into her party at the door. + +Rather ashamed that on my first appearance I had stayed so late, I +joined the last of Gatsby's guests who were clustered around him. I +wanted to explain that I'd hunted for him early in the evening and to +apologize for not having known him in the garden. + +"Don't mention it," he enjoined me eagerly. "Don't give it another +thought, old sport." The familiar expression held no more familiarity +than the hand which reassuringly brushed my shoulder. "And don't forget +we're going up in the hydroplane tomorrow morning at nine o'clock." + +Then the butler, behind his shoulder: + +"Philadelphia wants you on the phone, sir." + +"All right, in a minute. Tell them I'll be right there. . . . good +night." + +"Good night." + +"Good night." He smiled--and suddenly there seemed to be a pleasant +significance in having been among the last to go, as if he had desired +it all the time. "Good night, old sport. . . . Good night." + +But as I walked down the steps I saw that the evening was not quite over. +Fifty feet from the door a dozen headlights illuminated a bizarre and +tumultuous scene. In the ditch beside the road, right side up but +violently shorn of one wheel, rested a new coupé which had left Gatsby's +drive not two minutes before. The sharp jut of a wall accounted for the +detachment of the wheel which was now getting considerable attention from +half a dozen curious chauffeurs. However, as they had left their cars +blocking the road a harsh discordant din from those in the rear had been +audible for some time and added to the already violent confusion of +the scene. + +A man in a long duster had dismounted from the wreck and now stood in +the middle of the road, looking from the car to the tire and from the +tire to the observers in a pleasant, puzzled way. + +"See!" he explained. "It went in the ditch." + +The fact was infinitely astonishing to him--and I recognized first the +unusual quality of wonder and then the man--it was the late patron of +Gatsby's library. + +"How'd it happen?" + +He shrugged his shoulders. + +"I know nothing whatever about mechanics," he said decisively. + +"But how did it happen? Did you run into the wall?" + +"Don't ask me," said Owl Eyes, washing his hands of the whole matter. +"I know very little about driving--next to nothing. It happened, +and that's all I know." + +"Well, if you're a poor driver you oughtn't to try driving at night." + +"But I wasn't even trying," he explained indignantly, "I wasn't even +trying." + +An awed hush fell upon the bystanders. + +"Do you want to commit suicide?" + +"You're lucky it was just a wheel! A bad driver and not even TRYing!" + +"You don't understand," explained the criminal. "I wasn't driving. There's +another man in the car." + +The shock that followed this declaration found voice in a sustained +"Ah-h-h!" as the door of the coupé swung slowly open. The crowd--it was +now a crowd--stepped back involuntarily and when the door had opened wide +there was a ghostly pause. Then, very gradually, part by part, a pale +dangling individual stepped out of the wreck, pawing tentatively at the +ground with a large uncertain dancing shoe. + +Blinded by the glare of the headlights and confused by the incessant +groaning of the horns the apparition stood swaying for a moment before +he perceived the man in the duster. + +"Wha's matter?" he inquired calmly. "Did we run outa gas?" + +"Look!" + +Half a dozen fingers pointed at the amputated wheel--he stared +at it for a moment and then looked upward as though he suspected that +it had dropped from the sky. + +"It came off," some one explained. + +He nodded. + +"At first I din' notice we'd stopped." + +A pause. Then, taking a long breath and straightening his shoulders +he remarked in a determined voice: + +"Wonder'ff tell me where there's a gas'line station?" + +At least a dozen men, some of them little better off than he was, +explained to him that wheel and car were no longer joined by any physical +bond. + +"Back out," he suggested after a moment. "Put her in reverse." + +"But the WHEEL'S off!" + +He hesitated. + +"No harm in trying," he said. + +The caterwauling horns had reached a crescendo and I turned away and +cut across the lawn toward home. I glanced back once. A wafer of a moon +was shining over Gatsby's house, making the night fine as before and +surviving the laughter and the sound of his still glowing garden. A +sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great +doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host who +stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell. + + +Reading over what I have written so far I see I have given the +impression that the events of three nights several weeks apart were all +that absorbed me. On the contrary they were merely casual events in a +crowded summer and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less +than my personal affairs. + +Most of the time I worked. In the early morning the sun threw my shadow +westward as I hurried down the white chasms of lower New York to the +Probity Trust. I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by their +first names and lunched with them in dark crowded restaurants on +little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee. I even had a short +affair with a girl who lived in Jersey City and worked in the +accounting department, but her brother began throwing mean looks in my +direction so when she went on her vacation in July I let it blow +quietly away. + +I took dinner usually at the Yale Club--for some reason it was the +gloomiest event of my day--and then I went upstairs to the library and +studied investments and securities for a conscientious hour. +There were generally a few rioters around but they never came into the +library so it was a good place to work. After that, if the night was +mellow I strolled down Madison Avenue past the old Murray Hill Hotel +and over Thirty-third Street to the Pennsylvania Station. + +I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night +and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and +machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and +pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few +minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever +know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their +apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled +back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the +enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, +and felt it in others--poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows +waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner--young clerks +in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life. + +Again at eight o'clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were five +deep with throbbing taxi cabs, bound for the theatre district, I felt a +sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, +and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted +cigarettes outlined unintelligible gestures inside. Imagining that +I, too, was hurrying toward gayety and sharing their intimate +excitement, I wished them well. + +For a while I lost sight of Jordan Baker, and then in midsummer I found +her again. At first I was flattered to go places with her because she +was a golf champion and every one knew her name. Then it was +something more. I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of +tender curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the +world concealed something--most affectations conceal something +eventually, even though they don't in the beginning--and one day I found +what it was. When we were on a house-party together up in Warwick, she +left a borrowed car out in the rain with the top down, and then lied +about it--and suddenly I remembered the story about her that had eluded +me that night at Daisy's. At her first big golf tournament there was a +row that nearly reached the newspapers--a suggestion that she had moved +her ball from a bad lie in the semi-final round. The thing approached +the proportions of a scandal--then died away. A caddy retracted his +statement and the only other witness admitted that he might have been +mistaken. The incident and the name had remained together in my mind. + +Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever shrewd men and now I saw +that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence +from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. +She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage, and given this +unwillingness I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she +was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the +world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard jaunty body. + +It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never +blame deeply--I was casually sorry, and then I forgot. It was on that +same house party that we had a curious conversation about driving a +car. It started because she passed so close to some workmen that our +fender flicked a button on one man's coat. + +"You're a rotten driver," I protested. "Either you ought to be more +careful or you oughtn't to drive at all." + +"I am careful." + +"No, you're not." + +"Well, other people are," she said lightly. + +"What's that got to do with it?" + +"They'll keep out of my way," she insisted. "It takes two to make an +accident." + +"Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself." + +"I hope I never will," she answered. "I hate careless people. That's why +I like you." + +Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had +deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved +her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes +on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of +that tangle back home. I'd been writing letters once a week and signing +them: "Love, Nick," and all I could think of was how, when that certain +girl played tennis, a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on her +upper lip. Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that had to be +tactfully broken off before I was free. + +Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and +this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known. + + + + +Chapter 4 + + + +On Sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages along shore +the world and its mistress returned to Gatsby's house and twinkled +hilariously on his lawn. + +"He's a bootlegger," said the young ladies, moving somewhere between +his cocktails and his flowers. "One time he killed a man who had found out +that he was nephew to von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil. +Reach me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that there crystal +glass." + +Once I wrote down on the empty spaces of a time-table the names +of those who came to Gatsby's house that summer. It is an old time-table +now, disintegrating at its folds and headed "This schedule in effect +July 5th, 1922." But I can still read the grey names and they will give +you a better impression than my generalities of those who accepted +Gatsby's hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing nothing +whatever about him. + +From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches and a +man named Bunsen whom I knew at Yale and Doctor Webster Civet who +was drowned last summer up in Maine. And the Hornbeams and the Willie +Voltaires and a whole clan named Blackbuck who always gathered in a +corner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosoever came near. +And the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr. +Chrystie's wife) and Edgar Beaver, whose hair they say turned +cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all. + +Clarence Endive was from East Egg, as I remember. He came only +once, in white knickerbockers, and had a fight with a bum named +Etty in the garden. From farther out on the Island came the Cheadles +and the O. R. P. Schraeders and the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of +Georgia and the Fishguards and the Ripley Snells. Snell was there +three days before he went to the penitentiary, so drunk out on the +gravel drive that Mrs. Ulysses Swett's automobile ran over his right +hand. The Dancies came too and S. B. Whitebait, who was well over +sixty, and Maurice A. Flink and the Hammerheads and Beluga the +tobacco importer and Beluga's girls. + +From West Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys and Cecil Roebuck and +Cecil Schoen and Gulick the state senator and Newton Orchid who +controlled Films Par Excellence and Eckhaust and Clyde Cohen and Don +S. Schwartze (the son) and Arthur McCarty, all connected with the +movies in one way or another. And the Catlips and the Bembergs and G. +Earl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon who afterward strangled his wife. +Da Fontano the promoter came there, and Ed Legros and James B. +("Rot-Gut") Ferret and the De Jongs and Ernest Lilly--they came to +gamble and when Ferret wandered into the garden it meant he was +cleaned out and Associated Traction would have to fluctuate profitably +next day. + +A man named Klipspringer was there so often and so long that he became +known as "the boarder"--I doubt if he had any other home. Of theatrical +people there were Gus Waize and Horace O'Donavan and Lester Meyer and +George Duckweed and Francis Bull. Also from New York were the Chromes +and the Backhyssons and the Dennickers and Russel Betty and the +Corrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewars and the Scullys and S. W. +Belcher and the Smirkes and the young Quinns, divorced now, and Henry +L. Palmetto who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train +in Times Square. + +Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls. They were never quite +the same ones in physical person but they were so identical one with +another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before. I have +forgotten their names--Jaqueline, I think, or else Consuela or Gloria +or Judy or June, and their last names were either the melodious names +of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American +capitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to +be. + +In addition to all these I can remember that Faustina O'Brien came +there at least once and the Baedeker girls and young Brewer who had +his nose shot off in the war and Mr. Albrucksburger and Miss Haag, his +fiancée, and Ardita Fitz-Peters, and Mr. P. Jewett, once head of the +American Legion, and Miss Claudia Hip with a man reputed to be her +chauffeur, and a prince of something whom we called Duke and whose name, +if I ever knew it, I have forgotten. + +All these people came to Gatsby's house in the summer. + + +At nine o'clock, one morning late in July Gatsby's gorgeous car +lurched up the rocky drive to my door and gave out a burst of melody +from its three noted horn. It was the first time he had called on me +though I had gone to two of his parties, mounted in his hydroplane, +and, at his urgent invitation, made frequent use of his beach. + +"Good morning, old sport. You're having lunch with me today and I +thought we'd ride up together." + +He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that +resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American--that comes, +I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in youth +and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games. +This quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in +the shape of restlessness. He was never quite still; there was always a +tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand. + +He saw me looking with admiration at his car. + +"It's pretty, isn't it, old sport." He jumped off to give me a better +view. "Haven't you ever seen it before?" + +I'd seen it. Everybody had seen it. It was a rich cream color, bright +with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with +triumphant hatboxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a +labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down behind +many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory we started +to town. + +I had talked with him perhaps half a dozen times in the past month and +found, to my disappointment, that he had little to say. So my first +impression, that he was a person of some undefined consequence, had +gradually faded and he had become simply the proprietor of an elaborate +roadhouse next door. + +And then came that disconcerting ride. We hadn't reached West Egg +village before Gatsby began leaving his elegant sentences unfinished +and slapping himself indecisively on the knee of his caramel-colored +suit. + +"Look here, old sport," he broke out surprisingly. "What's your opinion +of me, anyhow?" + +A little overwhelmed, I began the generalized evasions which +that question deserves. + +"Well, I'm going to tell you something about my life," he interrupted. +"I don't want you to get a wrong idea of me from all these stories you +hear." + +So he was aware of the bizarre accusations that flavored conversation in +his halls. + +"I'll tell you God's truth." His right hand suddenly ordered divine +retribution to stand by. "I am the son of some wealthy people in the +middle-west--all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at +Oxford because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. +It is a family tradition." + +He looked at me sideways--and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was +lying. He hurried the phrase "educated at Oxford," or swallowed it or +choked on it as though it had bothered him before. And with this doubt +his whole statement fell to pieces and I wondered if there wasn't +something a little sinister about him after all. + +"What part of the middle-west?" I inquired casually. + +"San Francisco." + +"I see." + +"My family all died and I came into a good deal of money." + +His voice was solemn as if the memory of that sudden extinction of a clan +still haunted him. For a moment I suspected that he was pulling my leg +but a glance at him convinced me otherwise. + +"After that I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of +Europe--Paris, Venice, Rome--collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting +big game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to +forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago." + +With an effort I managed to restrain my incredulous laughter. The very +phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that of a +turbaned "character" leaking sawdust at every pore as he pursued a +tiger through the Bois de Boulogne. + +"Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief and I tried very +hard to die but I seemed to bear an enchanted life. I accepted a +commission as first lieutenant when it began. In the Argonne Forest I +took two machine-gun detachments so far forward that there was a half +mile gap on either side of us where the infantry couldn't advance. We +stayed there two days and two nights, a hundred and thirty men with +sixteen Lewis guns, and when the infantry came up at last they found +the insignia of three German divisions among the piles of dead. I was +promoted to be a major and every Allied government gave me a +decoration--even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the Adriatic +Sea!" + +Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them--with +his smile. The smile comprehended Montenegro's troubled history and +sympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. It +appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances which had +elicited this tribute from Montenegro's warm little heart. My +incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming +hastily through a dozen magazines. + +He reached in his pocket and a piece of metal, slung on a ribbon, fell +into my palm. + +"That's the one from Montenegro." + +To my astonishment, the thing had an authentic look. + +_Orderi di Danilo_, ran the circular legend, _Montenegro, Nicolas Rex_. + +"Turn it." + +_Major Jay Gatsby_, I read, _For Valour Extraordinary_. + +"Here's another thing I always carry. A souvenir of Oxford days. It was +taken in Trinity Quad--the man on my left is now the Earl of Dorcaster." + +It was a photograph of half a dozen young men in blazers loafing in an +archway through which were visible a host of spires. There was Gatsby, +looking a little, not much, younger--with a cricket bat in his hand. + +Then it was all true. I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace +on the Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with +their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart. + +"I'm going to make a big request of you today," he said, pocketing his +souvenirs with satisfaction, "so I thought you ought to know something +about me. I didn't want you to think I was just some nobody. You see, +I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there +trying to forget the sad thing that happened to me." He hesitated. +"You'll hear about it this afternoon." + +"At lunch?" + +"No, this afternoon. I happened to find out that you're taking Miss Baker +to tea." + +"Do you mean you're in love with Miss Baker?" + +"No, old sport, I'm not. But Miss Baker has kindly consented to speak +to you about this matter." + +I hadn't the faintest idea what "this matter" was, but I was more +annoyed than interested. I hadn't asked Jordan to tea in order to discuss +Mr. Jay Gatsby. I was sure the request would be something utterly +fantastic and for a moment I was sorry I'd ever set foot upon his +overpopulated lawn. + +He wouldn't say another word. His correctness grew on him as we neared +the city. We passed Port Roosevelt, where there was a glimpse of +red-belted ocean-going ships, and sped along a cobbled slum lined with +the dark, undeserted saloons of the faded gilt nineteen-hundreds. Then +the valley of ashes opened out on both sides of us, and I had a glimpse +of Mrs. Wilson straining at the garage pump with panting vitality as we +went by. + +With fenders spread like wings we scattered light through half +Astoria--only half, for as we twisted among the pillars of the +elevated I heard the familiar "jug--jug--SPAT!" of a motor cycle, and a +frantic policeman rode alongside. + +"All right, old sport," called Gatsby. We slowed down. Taking a white +card from his wallet he waved it before the man's eyes. + +"Right you are," agreed the policeman, tipping his cap. "Know you next +time, Mr. Gatsby. Excuse ME!" + +"What was that?" I inquired. "The picture of Oxford?" + +"I was able to do the commissioner a favor once, and he sends me a +Christmas card every year." + +Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a +constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the +river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of +non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always +the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the +mystery and the beauty in the world. + +A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two +carriages with drawn blinds and by more cheerful carriages for +friends. The friends looked out at us with the tragic eyes and short +upper lips of south-eastern Europe, and I was glad that the sight of +Gatsby's splendid car was included in their somber holiday. As we +crossed Blackwell's Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white +chauffeur, in which sat three modish Negroes, two bucks and a girl. I +laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in +haughty rivalry. + +"Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge," I thought; +"anything at all. . . ." + +Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder. + + +Roaring noon. In a well-fanned Forty-second Street cellar I met Gatsby +for lunch. Blinking away the brightness of the street outside my eyes +picked him out obscurely in the anteroom, talking to another man. + +"Mr. Carraway this is my friend Mr. Wolfshiem." + +A small, flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two +fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril. After a moment I +discovered his tiny eyes in the half darkness. + +"--so I took one look at him--" said Mr. Wolfshiem, shaking my hand +earnestly, "--and what do you think I did?" + +"What?" I inquired politely. + +But evidently he was not addressing me for he dropped my hand and +covered Gatsby with his expressive nose. + +"I handed the money to Katspaugh and I sid, 'All right, Katspaugh, +don't pay him a penny till he shuts his mouth.' He shut it then and +there." + +Gatsby took an arm of each of us and moved forward into the +restaurant whereupon Mr. Wolfshiem swallowed a new sentence he was +starting and lapsed into a somnambulatory abstraction. + +"Highballs?" asked the head waiter. + +"This is a nice restaurant here," said Mr. Wolfshiem looking at the +Presbyterian nymphs on the ceiling. "But I like across the street better!" + +"Yes, highballs," agreed Gatsby, and then to Mr. Wolfshiem: "It's too hot +over there." + +"Hot and small--yes," said Mr. Wolfshiem, "but full of memories." + +"What place is that?" I asked. + +"The old Metropole. + +"The old Metropole," brooded Mr. Wolfshiem gloomily. "Filled with faces +dead and gone. Filled with friends gone now forever. I can't forget so +long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there. It was six of us +at the table and Rosy had eat and drunk a lot all evening. When it was +almost morning the waiter came up to him with a funny look and says +somebody wants to speak to him outside. 'All right,' says Rosy and begins +to get up and I pulled him down in his chair. + +" 'Let the bastards come in here if they want you, Rosy, but don't you, +so help me, move outside this room.' + +"It was four o'clock in the morning then, and if we'd of raised the blinds +we'd of seen daylight." + +"Did he go?" I asked innocently. + +"Sure he went,"--Mr. Wolfshiem's nose flashed at me indignantly--"He +turned around in the door and says, 'Don't let that waiter take away +my coffee!' Then he went out on the sidewalk and they shot him +three times in his full belly and drove away." + +"Four of them were electrocuted," I said, remembering. + +"Five with Becker." His nostrils turned to me in an interested way. +"I understand you're looking for a business gonnegtion." + +The juxtaposition of these two remarks was startling. Gatsby answered +for me: + +"Oh, no," he exclaimed, "this isn't the man!" + +"No?" Mr. Wolfshiem seemed disappointed. + +"This is just a friend. I told you we'd talk about that some other +time." + +"I beg your pardon," said Mr. Wolfshiem, "I had a wrong man." + +A succulent hash arrived, and Mr. Wolfshiem, forgetting the more +sentimental atmosphere of the old Metropole, began to eat with +ferocious delicacy. His eyes, meanwhile, roved very slowly all around the +room--he completed the arc by turning to inspect the people directly +behind. I think that, except for my presence, he would have taken one +short glance beneath our own table. + +"Look here, old sport," said Gatsby, leaning toward me, "I'm afraid I +made you a little angry this morning in the car." + +There was the smile again, but this time I held out against it. + +"I don't like mysteries," I answered. "And I don't understand why you +won't come out frankly and tell me what you want. Why has it all got to +come through Miss Baker?" + +"Oh, it's nothing underhand," he assured me. "Miss Baker's a great +sportswoman, you know, and she'd never do anything that wasn't all right." + +Suddenly he looked at his watch, jumped up and hurried from the room +leaving me with Mr. Wolfshiem at the table. + +"He has to telephone," said Mr. Wolfshiem, following him with his eyes. +"Fine fellow, isn't he? Handsome to look at and a perfect gentleman." + +"Yes." + +"He's an Oggsford man." + +"Oh!" + +"He went to Oggsford College in England. You know Oggsford College?" + +"I've heard of it." + +"It's one of the most famous colleges in the world." + +"Have you known Gatsby for a long time?" I inquired. + +"Several years," he answered in a gratified way. "I made the pleasure of +his acquaintance just after the war. But I knew I had discovered a man of +fine breeding after I talked with him an hour. I said to myself: 'There's +the kind of man you'd like to take home and introduce to your mother and +sister.' " He paused. "I see you're looking at my cuff buttons." + +I hadn't been looking at them, but I did now. They were composed of +oddly familiar pieces of ivory. + +"Finest specimens of human molars," he informed me. + +"Well!" I inspected them. "That's a very interesting idea." + +"Yeah." He flipped his sleeves up under his coat. "Yeah, Gatsby's very +careful about women. He would never so much as look at a friend's wife." + +When the subject of this instinctive trust returned to the table and sat +down Mr. Wolfshiem drank his coffee with a jerk and got to his feet. + +"I have enjoyed my lunch," he said, "and I'm going to run off from you +two young men before I outstay my welcome." + +"Don't hurry, Meyer," said Gatsby, without enthusiasm. Mr. Wolfshiem +raised his hand in a sort of benediction. + +"You're very polite but I belong to another generation," he announced +solemnly. "You sit here and discuss your sports and your young ladies and +your----" He supplied an imaginary noun with another wave of his +hand--"As for me, I am fifty years old, and I won't impose myself +on you any longer." + +As he shook hands and turned away his tragic nose was trembling. +I wondered if I had said anything to offend him. + +"He becomes very sentimental sometimes," explained Gatsby. "This is one of +his sentimental days. He's quite a character around New York--a denizen of +Broadway." + +"Who is he anyhow--an actor?" + +"No." + +"A dentist?" + +"Meyer Wolfshiem? No, he's a gambler." Gatsby hesitated, then added +coolly: "He's the man who fixed the World's Series back in 1919." + +"Fixed the World's Series?" I repeated. + +The idea staggered me. I remembered of course that the World's Series +had been fixed in 1919 but if I had thought of it at all I would have +thought of it as a thing that merely HAPPENED, the end of some +inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to +play with the faith of fifty million people--with the single-mindedness +of a burglar blowing a safe. + +"How did he happen to do that?" I asked after a minute. + +"He just saw the opportunity." + +"Why isn't he in jail?" + +"They can't get him, old sport. He's a smart man." + +I insisted on paying the check. As the waiter brought my change I caught +sight of Tom Buchanan across the crowded room. + +"Come along with me for a minute," I said. "I've got to say hello +to someone." + +When he saw us Tom jumped up and took half a dozen steps in our +direction. + +"Where've you been?" he demanded eagerly. "Daisy's furious because you +haven't called up." + +"This is Mr. Gatsby, Mr. Buchanan." + +They shook hands briefly and a strained, unfamiliar look of embarrassment +came over Gatsby's face. + +"How've you been, anyhow?" demanded Tom of me. "How'd you happen to come +up this far to eat?" + +"I've been having lunch with Mr. Gatsby." + +I turned toward Mr. Gatsby, but he was no longer there. + + +One October day in nineteen-seventeen---- +(said Jordan Baker that afternoon, sitting up very straight on a straight +chair in the tea-garden at the Plaza Hotel) +--I was walking along from one place to another half on the sidewalks and +half on the lawns. I was happier on the lawns because I had on shoes from +England with rubber nobs on the soles that bit into the soft ground. +I had on a new plaid skirt also that blew a little in the wind and +whenever this happened the red, white and blue banners in front of all +the houses stretched out stiff and said TUT-TUT-TUT-TUT in a disapproving +way. + +The largest of the banners and the largest of the lawns belonged to +Daisy Fay's house. She was just eighteen, two years older than me, and +by far the most popular of all the young girls in Louisville. She +dressed in white, and had a little white roadster and all day long +the telephone rang in her house and excited young officers from Camp +Taylor demanded the privilege of monopolizing her that night, "anyways, +for an hour!" + +When I came opposite her house that morning her white roadster was beside +the curb, and she was sitting in it with a lieutenant I had never seen +before. They were so engrossed in each other that she didn't see me until +I was five feet away. + +"Hello Jordan," she called unexpectedly. "Please come here." + +I was flattered that she wanted to speak to me, because of all the older +girls I admired her most. She asked me if I was going to the Red Cross and +make bandages. I was. Well, then, would I tell them that she couldn't come +that day? The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way +that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because it +seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since. His name +was Jay Gatsby and I didn't lay eyes on him again for over four +years--even after I'd met him on Long Island I didn't realize it was the +same man. + +That was nineteen-seventeen. By the next year I had a few beaux myself, +and I began to play in tournaments, so I didn't see Daisy very often. +She went with a slightly older crowd--when she went with anyone at all. +Wild rumors were circulating about her--how her mother had found her +packing her bag one winter night to go to New York and say goodbye to a +soldier who was going overseas. She was effectually prevented, but she +wasn't on speaking terms with her family for several weeks. After +that she didn't play around with the soldiers any more but only +with a few flat-footed, short-sighted young men in town who couldn't +get into the army at all. + +By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever. She had a debut +after the Armistice, and in February she was presumably engaged to a +man from New Orleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago with +more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before. He came +down with a hundred people in four private cars and hired a whole +floor of the Seelbach Hotel, and the day before the wedding he gave her +a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. + +I was bridesmaid. I came into her room half an hour before the bridal +dinner, and found her lying on her bed as lovely as the June night in +her flowered dress--and as drunk as a monkey. She had a bottle of +sauterne in one hand and a letter in the other. + +" 'Gratulate me," she muttered. "Never had a drink before but oh, how I do +enjoy it." + +"What's the matter, Daisy?" + +I was scared, I can tell you; I'd never seen a girl like that before. + +"Here, dearis." She groped around in a waste-basket she had with her +on the bed and pulled out the string of pearls. "Take 'em downstairs and +give 'em back to whoever they belong to. Tell 'em all Daisy's change' her +mine. Say 'Daisy's change' her mine!'." + +She began to cry--she cried and cried. I rushed out and found her +mother's maid and we locked the door and got her into a cold bath. She +wouldn't let go of the letter. She took it into the tub with her and +squeezed it up into a wet ball, and only let me leave it in the +soap dish when she saw that it was coming to pieces like snow. + +But she didn't say another word. We gave her spirits of ammonia and put +ice on her forehead and hooked her back into her dress and half an +hour later when we walked out of the room the pearls were around her +neck and the incident was over. Next day at five o'clock she married Tom +Buchanan without so much as a shiver and started off on a three months' +trip to the South Seas. + +I saw them in Santa Barbara when they came back and I thought I'd +never seen a girl so mad about her husband. If he left the room for a +minute she'd look around uneasily and say "Where's Tom gone?" and +wear the most abstracted expression until she saw him coming in the +door. She used to sit on the sand with his head in her lap by the hour +rubbing her fingers over his eyes and looking at him with unfathomable +delight. It was touching to see them together--it made you laugh in a +hushed, fascinated way. That was in August. A week after I left Santa +Barbara Tom ran into a wagon on the Ventura road one night and ripped +a front wheel off his car. The girl who was with him got into the +papers too because her arm was broken--she was one of the chambermaids +in the Santa Barbara Hotel. + +The next April Daisy had her little girl and they went to France for a +year. I saw them one spring in Cannes and later in Deauville and then +they came back to Chicago to settle down. Daisy was popular in Chicago, +as you know. They moved with a fast crowd, all of them young and rich +and wild, but she came out with an absolutely perfect reputation. +Perhaps because she doesn't drink. It's a great advantage not to drink +among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and, moreover, +you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else +is so blind that they don't see or care. Perhaps Daisy never went in +for amour at all--and yet there's something in that voice of hers. . . . + +Well, about six weeks ago, she heard the name Gatsby for the first time +in years. It was when I asked you--do you remember?--if you knew Gatsby +in West Egg. After you had gone home she came into my room and woke me +up, and said "What Gatsby?" and when I described him--I was half +asleep--she said in the strangest voice that it must be the man she used +to know. It wasn't until then that I connected this Gatsby with the +officer in her white car. + + +When Jordan Baker had finished telling all this we had left the Plaza +for half an hour and were driving in a Victoria through Central Park. +The sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in +the West Fifties and the clear voices of girls, already gathered like +crickets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight: + + + "I'm the Sheik of Araby, + Your love belongs to me. + At night when you're are asleep, + Into your tent I'll creep----" + + +"It was a strange coincidence," I said. + +"But it wasn't a coincidence at all." + +"Why not?" + +"Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay." + +Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired +on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the +womb of his purposeless splendor. + +"He wants to know--" continued Jordan "--if you'll invite Daisy to your +house some afternoon and then let him come over." + +The modesty of the demand shook me. He had waited five years and bought a +mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths so that he could +"come over" some afternoon to a stranger's garden. + +"Did I have to know all this before he could ask such a little thing?" + +"He's afraid. He's waited so long. He thought you might be offended. +You see he's a regular tough underneath it all." + +Something worried me. + +"Why didn't he ask you to arrange a meeting?" + +"He wants her to see his house," she explained. "And your house is right +next door." + +"Oh!" + +"I think he half expected her to wander into one of his parties, +some night," went on Jordan, "but she never did. Then he began asking +people casually if they knew her, and I was the first one he found. +It was that night he sent for me at his dance, and you should have +heard the elaborate way he worked up to it. Of course, I immediately +suggested a luncheon in New York--and I thought he'd go mad: + +" 'I don't want to do anything out of the way!' he kept saying. 'I want to +see her right next door.' + +"When I said you were a particular friend of Tom's he started to abandon +the whole idea. He doesn't know very much about Tom, though he says he's +read a Chicago paper for years just on the chance of catching a glimpse +of Daisy's name." + +It was dark now, and as we dipped under a little bridge I put my arm +around Jordan's golden shoulder and drew her toward me and asked her to +dinner. Suddenly I wasn't thinking of Daisy and Gatsby any more but of +this clean, hard, limited person who dealt in universal skepticism and +who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. A phrase began +to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: "There are only the +pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired." + +"And Daisy ought to have something in her life," murmured Jordan to me. + +"Does she want to see Gatsby?" + +"She's not to know about it. Gatsby doesn't want her to know. You're +just supposed to invite her to tea." + +We passed a barrier of dark trees, and then the facade of Fifty-ninth +Street, a block of delicate pale light, beamed down into the park. +Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied face +floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs and so I drew up the +girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan, scornful mouth smiled and so +I drew her up again, closer, this time to my face. + + + + +Chapter 5 + + + +When I came home to West Egg that night I was afraid for a moment that +my house was on fire. Two o'clock and the whole corner of the peninsula +was blazing with light which fell unreal on the shrubbery and made thin +elongating glints upon the roadside wires. Turning a corner I saw that it +was Gatsby's house, lit from tower to cellar. + +At first I thought it was another party, a wild rout that had resolved +itself into "hide-and-go-seek" or "sardines-in-the-box" with all the +house thrown open to the game. But there wasn't a sound. Only wind in +the trees which blew the wires and made the lights go off and on again +as if the house had winked into the darkness. As my taxi groaned away I +saw Gatsby walking toward me across his lawn. + +"Your place looks like the world's fair," I said. + +"Does it?" He turned his eyes toward it absently. "I have been glancing +into some of the rooms. Let's go to Coney Island, old sport. In my car." + +"It's too late." + +"Well, suppose we take a plunge in the swimming pool? I haven't made use +of it all summer." + +"I've got to go to bed." + +"All right." + +He waited, looking at me with suppressed eagerness. + +"I talked with Miss Baker," I said after a moment. "I'm going to call up +Daisy tomorrow and invite her over here to tea." + +"Oh, that's all right," he said carelessly. "I don't want to put you to +any trouble." + +"What day would suit you?" + +"What day would suit YOU?" he corrected me quickly. "I don't want to put +you to any trouble, you see." + +"How about the day after tomorrow?" He considered for a moment. Then, +with reluctance: + +"I want to get the grass cut," he said. + +We both looked at the grass--there was a sharp line where my ragged lawn +ended and the darker, well-kept expanse of his began. I suspected that +he meant my grass. + +"There's another little thing," he said uncertainly, and hesitated. + +"Would you rather put it off for a few days?" I asked. + +"Oh, it isn't about that. At least----" He fumbled with a series of +beginnings. "Why, I thought--why, look here, old sport, you don't make +much money, do you?" + +"Not very much." + +This seemed to reassure him and he continued more confidently. + +"I thought you didn't, if you'll pardon my--you see, I carry on a +little business on the side, a sort of sideline, you understand. And I +thought that if you don't make very much--You're selling bonds, aren't +you, old sport?" + +"Trying to." + +"Well, this would interest you. It wouldn't take up much of your +time and you might pick up a nice bit of money. It happens to be +a rather confidential sort of thing." + +I realize now that under different circumstances that conversation might +have been one of the crises of my life. But, because the offer was +obviously and tactlessly for a service to be rendered, I had no choice +except to cut him off there. + +"I've got my hands full," I said. "I'm much obliged but I couldn't take +on any more work." + +"You wouldn't have to do any business with Wolfshiem." Evidently he +thought that I was shying away from the "gonnegtion" mentioned at lunch, +but I assured him he was wrong. He waited a moment longer, hoping I'd +begin a conversation, but I was too absorbed to be responsive, so he went +unwillingly home. + +The evening had made me light-headed and happy; I think I walked into a +deep sleep as I entered my front door. So I didn't know whether or not +Gatsby went to Coney Island or for how many hours he "glanced into +rooms" while his house blazed gaudily on. I called up Daisy from the +office next morning and invited her to come to tea. + +"Don't bring Tom," I warned her. + +"What?" + +"Don't bring Tom." + +"Who is 'Tom'?" she asked innocently. + +The day agreed upon was pouring rain. At eleven o'clock a man in a +raincoat dragging a lawn-mower tapped at my front door and said that +Mr. Gatsby had sent him over to cut my grass. This reminded me that I +had forgotten to tell my Finn to come back so I drove into West Egg +Village to search for her among soggy white-washed alleys and to buy +some cups and lemons and flowers. + +The flowers were unnecessary, for at two o'clock a greenhouse arrived +from Gatsby's, with innumerable receptacles to contain it. An hour +later the front door opened nervously, and Gatsby in a white flannel +suit, silver shirt and gold-colored tie hurried in. He was pale and +there were dark signs of sleeplessness beneath his eyes. + +"Is everything all right?" he asked immediately. + +"The grass looks fine, if that's what you mean." + +"What grass?" he inquired blankly. "Oh, the grass in the yard." He looked +out the window at it, but judging from his expression I don't believe +he saw a thing. + +"Looks very good," he remarked vaguely. "One of the papers said they +thought the rain would stop about four. I think it was 'The Journal.' Have +you got everything you need in the shape of--of tea?" + +I took him into the pantry where he looked a little reproachfully at the +Finn. Together we scrutinized the twelve lemon cakes from the delicatessen +shop. + +"Will they do?" I asked. + +"Of course, of course! They're fine!" and he added hollowly, ". . .old +sport." + +The rain cooled about half-past three to a damp mist through which +occasional thin drops swam like dew. Gatsby looked with vacant eyes +through a copy of Clay's "Economics," starting at the Finnish tread that +shook the kitchen floor and peering toward the bleared windows from time +to time as if a series of invisible but alarming happenings were taking +place outside. Finally he got up and informed me in an uncertain voice +that he was going home. + +"Why's that?" + +"Nobody's coming to tea. It's too late!" He looked at his watch as if +there was some pressing demand on his time elsewhere. "I can't wait +all day." + +"Don't be silly; it's just two minutes to four." + +He sat down, miserably, as if I had pushed him, and simultaneously there +was the sound of a motor turning into my lane. We both jumped up and, +a little harrowed myself, I went out into the yard. + +Under the dripping bare lilac trees a large open car was coming up the +drive. It stopped. Daisy's face, tipped sideways beneath a +three-cornered lavender hat, looked out at me with a bright ecstatic +smile. + +"Is this absolutely where you live, my dearest one?" + +The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I had +to follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone +before any words came through. A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of +blue paint across her cheek and her hand was wet with glistening drops as +I took it to help her from the car. + +"Are you in love with me," she said low in my ear. "Or why did I have +to come alone?" + +"That's the secret of Castle Rackrent. Tell your chauffeur to go far +away and spend an hour." + +"Come back in an hour, Ferdie." Then in a grave murmur, "His name is +Ferdie." + +"Does the gasoline affect his nose?" + +"I don't think so," she said innocently. "Why?" + +We went in. To my overwhelming surprise the living room was deserted. + +"Well, that's funny!" I exclaimed. + +"What's funny?" + +She turned her head as there was a light, dignified knocking at the front +door. I went out and opened it. Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands +plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of +water glaring tragically into my eyes. + +With his hands still in his coat pockets he stalked by me into the +hall, turned sharply as if he were on a wire and disappeared into the +living room. It wasn't a bit funny. Aware of the loud beating of my own +heart I pulled the door to against the increasing rain. + +For half a minute there wasn't a sound. Then from the living room I +heard a sort of choking murmur and part of a laugh followed by Daisy's +voice on a clear artificial note. + +"I certainly am awfully glad to see you again." + +A pause; it endured horribly. I had nothing to do in the hall so I went +into the room. + +Gatsby, his hands still in his pockets, was reclining against the +mantelpiece in a strained counterfeit of perfect ease, even of boredom. +His head leaned back so far that it rested against the face of a +defunct mantelpiece clock and from this position his distraught eyes +stared down at Daisy who was sitting frightened but graceful on the +edge of a stiff chair. + +"We've met before," muttered Gatsby. His eyes glanced momentarily at +me and his lips parted with an abortive attempt at a laugh. Luckily +the clock took this moment to tilt dangerously at the pressure of his +head, whereupon he turned and caught it with trembling fingers and set +it back in place. Then he sat down, rigidly, his elbow on the arm of the +sofa and his chin in his hand. + +"I'm sorry about the clock," he said. + +My own face had now assumed a deep tropical burn. I couldn't muster up +a single commonplace out of the thousand in my head. + +"It's an old clock," I told them idiotically. + +I think we all believed for a moment that it had smashed in pieces on +the floor. + +"We haven't met for many years," said Daisy, her voice as matter-of-fact +as it could ever be. + +"Five years next November." + +The automatic quality of Gatsby's answer set us all back at least another +minute. I had them both on their feet with the desperate suggestion that +they help me make tea in the kitchen when the demoniac Finn brought it in +on a tray. + +Amid the welcome confusion of cups and cakes a certain physical decency +established itself. Gatsby got himself into a shadow and while Daisy +and I talked looked conscientiously from one to the other of us with +tense unhappy eyes. However, as calmness wasn't an end in itself I +made an excuse at the first possible moment and got to my feet. + +"Where are you going?" demanded Gatsby in immediate alarm. + +"I'll be back." + +"I've got to speak to you about something before you go." + +He followed me wildly into the kitchen, closed the door and whispered: +"Oh, God!" in a miserable way. + +"What's the matter?" + +"This is a terrible mistake," he said, shaking his head from side to +side, "a terrible, terrible mistake." + +"You're just embarrassed, that's all," and luckily I added: "Daisy's +embarrassed too." + +"She's embarrassed?" he repeated incredulously. + +"Just as much as you are." + +"Don't talk so loud." + +"You're acting like a little boy," I broke out impatiently. "Not only +that but you're rude. Daisy's sitting in there all alone." + + +He raised his hand to stop my words, looked at me with unforgettable +reproach and opening the door cautiously went back into the other room. + +I walked out the back way--just as Gatsby had when he had made his +nervous circuit of the house half an hour before--and ran for a huge +black knotted tree whose massed leaves made a fabric against the rain. +Once more it was pouring and my irregular lawn, well-shaved by +Gatsby's gardener, abounded in small muddy swamps and prehistoric +marshes. There was nothing to look at from under the tree except +Gatsby's enormous house, so I stared at it, like Kant at his church +steeple, for half an hour. A brewer had built it early in the "period" +craze, a decade before, and there was a story that he'd agreed to pay +five years' taxes on all the neighboring cottages if the owners would +have their roofs thatched with straw. Perhaps their refusal took the +heart out of his plan to Found a Family--he went into an immediate +decline. His children sold his house with the black wreath still on the +door. Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always +been obstinate about being peasantry. + +After half an hour the sun shone again and the grocer's automobile +rounded Gatsby's drive with the raw material for his servants' dinner--I +felt sure he wouldn't eat a spoonful. A maid began opening the upper +windows of his house, appeared momentarily in each, and, leaning from a +large central bay, spat meditatively into the garden. It was time I +went back. While the rain continued it had seemed like the murmur of +their voices, rising and swelling a little, now and then, with gusts of +emotion. But in the new silence I felt that silence had fallen within +the house too. + +I went in--after making every possible noise in the kitchen short of +pushing over the stove--but I don't believe they heard a sound. They +were sitting at either end of the couch looking at each other as if +some question had been asked or was in the air, and every vestige of +embarrassment was gone. Daisy's face was smeared with tears and when I +came in she jumped up and began wiping at it with her handkerchief before +a mirror. But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. +He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new +well-being radiated from him and filled the little room. + +"Oh, hello, old sport," he said, as if he hadn't seen me for years. I +thought for a moment he was going to shake hands. + +"It's stopped raining." + +"Has it?" When he realized what I was talking about, that there were +twinkle-bells of sunshine in the room, he smiled like a weather man, +like an ecstatic patron of recurrent light, and repeated the news to +Daisy. "What do you think of that? It's stopped raining." + +"I'm glad, Jay." Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told only +of her unexpected joy. + +"I want you and Daisy to come over to my house," he said, "I'd like to +show her around." + +"You're sure you want me to come?" + +"Absolutely, old sport." + +Daisy went upstairs to wash her face--too late I thought with humiliation +of my towels--while Gatsby and I waited on the lawn. + +"My house looks well, doesn't it?" he demanded. "See how the whole +front of it catches the light." + +I agreed that it was splendid. + +"Yes." His eyes went over it, every arched door and square tower. "It took +me just three years to earn the money that bought it." + +"I thought you inherited your money." + +"I did, old sport," he said automatically, "but I lost most of it in +the big panic--the panic of the war." + +I think he hardly knew what he was saying, for when I asked him what +business he was in he answered "That's my affair," before he realized +that it wasn't the appropriate reply. + +"Oh, I've been in several things," he corrected himself. "I was in the +drug business and then I was in the oil business. But I'm not in either +one now." He looked at me with more attention. "Do you mean you've been +thinking over what I proposed the other night?" + +Before I could answer, Daisy came out of the house and two rows of brass +buttons on her dress gleamed in the sunlight. + +"That huge place THERE?" she cried pointing. + +"Do you like it?" + +"I love it, but I don't see how you live there all alone." + +"I keep it always full of interesting people, night and day. People who +do interesting things. Celebrated people." + +Instead of taking the short cut along the Sound we went down the road and +entered by the big postern. With enchanting murmurs Daisy admired this +aspect or that of the feudal silhouette against the sky, admired the +gardens, the sparkling odor of jonquils and the frothy odor of hawthorn +and plum blossoms and the pale gold odor of kiss-me-at-the-gate. +It was strange to reach the marble steps and find no stir of bright +dresses in and out the door, and hear no sound but bird voices in the +trees. + +And inside as we wandered through Marie Antoinette music rooms and +Restoration salons I felt that there were guests concealed behind +every couch and table, under orders to be breathlessly silent until we +had passed through. As Gatsby closed the door of "the Merton College +Library" I could have sworn I heard the owl-eyed man break into +ghostly laughter. + +We went upstairs, through period bedrooms swathed in rose and lavender +silk and vivid with new flowers, through dressing rooms and poolrooms, +and bathrooms with sunken baths--intruding into one chamber where a +dishevelled man in pajamas was doing liver exercises on the floor. It +was Mr. Klipspringer, the "boarder." I had seen him wandering hungrily +about the beach that morning. Finally we came to Gatsby's own apartment, +a bedroom and a bath and an Adam study, where we sat down and drank a +glass of some Chartreuse he took from a cupboard in the wall. + +He hadn't once ceased looking at Daisy and I think he revalued +everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew +from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his +possessions in a dazed way as though in her actual and astounding +presence none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly toppled down a +flight of stairs. + +His bedroom was the simplest room of all--except where the dresser was +garnished with a toilet set of pure dull gold. Daisy took the brush +with delight and smoothed her hair, whereupon Gatsby sat down and +shaded his eyes and began to laugh. + +"It's the funniest thing, old sport," he said hilariously. "I can't--when +I try to----" + +He had passed visibly through two states and was entering upon a third. +After his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed with +wonder at her presence. He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it +right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an +inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running +down like an overwound clock. + +Recovering himself in a minute he opened for us two hulking patent +cabinets which held his massed suits and dressing-gowns and ties, and +his shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high. + +"I've got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection +of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall." + +He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one +before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel +which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in +many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft +rich heap mounted higher--shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in +coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange with monograms of +Indian blue. Suddenly with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into +the shirts and began to cry stormily. + +"They're such beautiful shirts," she sobbed, her voice muffled in the +thick folds. "It makes me sad because I've never seen such--such beautiful +shirts before." + + +After the house, we were to see the grounds and the swimming pool, and the +hydroplane and the midsummer flowers--but outside Gatsby's window it +began to rain again so we stood in a row looking at the corrugated +surface of the Sound. + +"If it wasn't for the mist we could see your home across the bay," said +Gatsby. "You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of +your dock." + +Daisy put her arm through his abruptly but he seemed absorbed +in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the +colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared +to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed +very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star +to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of +enchanted objects had diminished by one. + +I began to walk about the room, examining various indefinite objects in +the half darkness. A large photograph of an elderly man in yachting +costume attracted me, hung on the wall over his desk. + +"Who's this?" + +"That? That's Mr. Dan Cody, old sport." + +The name sounded faintly familiar. + +"He's dead now. He used to be my best friend years ago." + +There was a small picture of Gatsby, also in yachting costume, on the +bureau--Gatsby with his head thrown back defiantly--taken apparently +when he was about eighteen. + +"I adore it!" exclaimed Daisy. "The pompadour! You never told me you had +a pompadour--or a yacht." + +"Look at this," said Gatsby quickly. "Here's a lot of clippings--about +you." + +They stood side by side examining it. I was going to ask to see the rubies +when the phone rang and Gatsby took up the receiver. + +"Yes. . . . Well, I can't talk now. . . . I can't talk now, old +sport. . . . I said a SMALL town. . . . He must know what a small town +is. . . . Well, he's no use to us if Detroit is his idea of a small +town. . . ." + +He rang off. + +"Come here QUICK!" cried Daisy at the window. + +The rain was still falling, but the darkness had parted in the west, +and there was a pink and golden billow of foamy clouds above the sea. + +"Look at that," she whispered, and then after a moment: "I'd like to +just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you +around." + +I tried to go then, but they wouldn't hear of it; perhaps my presence +made them feel more satisfactorily alone. + +"I know what we'll do," said Gatsby, "we'll have Klipspringer play the +piano." + +He went out of the room calling "Ewing!" and returned in a few +minutes accompanied by an embarrassed, slightly worn young man with +shell-rimmed glasses and scanty blonde hair. He was now decently clothed +in a "sport shirt" open at the neck, sneakers and duck trousers of a +nebulous hue. + +"Did we interrupt your exercises?" inquired Daisy politely. + +"I was asleep," cried Mr. Klipspringer, in a spasm of embarrassment. +"That is, I'd BEEN asleep. Then I got up. . . ." + +"Klipspringer plays the piano," said Gatsby, cutting him off. "Don't you, +Ewing, old sport?" + +"I don't play well. I don't--I hardly play at all. I'm all out of +prac----" + +"We'll go downstairs," interrupted Gatsby. He flipped a switch. The +grey windows disappeared as the house glowed full of light. + +In the music room Gatsby turned on a solitary lamp beside the piano. He +lit Daisy's cigarette from a trembling match, and sat down with her on +a couch far across the room where there was no light save what the +gleaming floor bounced in from the hall. + +When Klipspringer had played "The Love Nest" he turned around on the +bench and searched unhappily for Gatsby in the gloom. + +"I'm all out of practice, you see. I told you I couldn't play. I'm all +out of prac----" + +"Don't talk so much, old sport," commanded Gatsby. "Play!" + + + IN THE MORNING, + IN THE EVENING, + AIN'T WE GOT FUN---- + +Outside the wind was loud and there was a faint flow of thunder along the +Sound. All the lights were going on in West Egg now; the electric trains, +men-carrying, were plunging home through the rain from New York. It was +the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on +the air. + + + ONE THING'S SURE AND NOTHING'S SURER + THE RICH GET RICHER AND THE POOR GET--CHILDREN. + IN THE MEANTIME, + IN BETWEEN TIME---- + + +As I went over to say goodbye I saw that the expression of bewilderment +had come back into Gatsby's face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to +him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five +years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when +Daisy tumbled short of his dreams--not through her own fault but +because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond +her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative +passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright +feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can +challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart. + +As I watched him he adjusted himself a little, visibly. His hand took +hold of hers and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward +her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most with its +fluctuating, feverish warmth because it couldn't be over-dreamed--that +voice was a deathless song. + +They had forgotten me, but Daisy glanced up and held out her hand; +Gatsby didn't know me now at all. I looked once more at them and they +looked back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life. Then I went out +of the room and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them there +together. + + + + +Chapter 6 + + + +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 row-boat, 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-absorption 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 along shore. + +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 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 Girl Bay. + +To the young Gatz, resting on his oars and looking up at the railed +deck, the yacht represented all the beauty and glamor 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 grey, 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 tomorrow, 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 grey 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 three 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 sidewalk 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. + + + + +Chapter 7 + + + +It was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights +in his house failed to go on one Saturday night--and, as obscurely as it +had begun, his career as Trimalchio was over. + +Only gradually did I become aware that the automobiles which turned +expectantly into his drive stayed for just a minute and then drove +sulkily away. Wondering if he were sick I went over to find out--an +unfamiliar butler with a villainous face squinted at me suspiciously +from the door. + +"Is Mr. Gatsby sick?" + +"Nope." After a pause he added "sir" in a dilatory, grudging way. + +"I hadn't seen him around, and I was rather worried. Tell him Mr. Carraway +came over." + +"Who?" he demanded rudely. + +"Carraway." + +"Carraway. All right, I'll tell him." Abruptly he slammed the door. + +My Finn informed me that Gatsby had dismissed every servant in his +house a week ago and replaced them with half a dozen others, who never +went into West Egg Village to be bribed by the tradesmen, but ordered +moderate supplies over the telephone. The grocery boy reported that the +kitchen looked like a pigsty, and the general opinion in the village was +that the new people weren't servants at all. + +Next day Gatsby called me on the phone. + +"Going away?" I inquired. + +"No, old sport." + +"I hear you fired all your servants." + +"I wanted somebody who wouldn't gossip. Daisy comes over quite often--in +the afternoons." + +So the whole caravansary had fallen in like a card house at the +disapproval in her eyes. + +"They're some people Wolfshiem wanted to do something for. They're all +brothers and sisters. They used to run a small hotel." + +"I see." + +He was calling up at Daisy's request--would I come to lunch at +her house tomorrow? Miss Baker would be there. Half an hour later +Daisy herself telephoned and seemed relieved to find that I was coming. +Something was up. And yet I couldn't believe that they would choose +this occasion for a scene--especially for the rather harrowing scene +that Gatsby had outlined in the garden. + +The next day was broiling, almost the last, certainly the warmest, of +the summer. As my train emerged from the tunnel into sunlight, only the +hot whistles of the National Biscuit Company broke the simmering hush +at noon. The straw seats of the car hovered on the edge of combustion; +the woman next to me perspired delicately for a while into her white +shirtwaist, and then, as her newspaper dampened under her fingers, +lapsed despairingly into deep heat with a desolate cry. Her pocket-book +slapped to the floor. + +"Oh, my!" she gasped. + +I picked it up with a weary bend and handed it back to her, holding it +at arm's length and by the extreme tip of the corners to indicate that +I had no designs upon it--but every one near by, including the woman, +suspected me just the same. + +"Hot!" said the conductor to familiar faces. "Some weather! Hot! Hot! Hot! +Is it hot enough for you? Is it hot? Is it . . . ?" + +My commutation ticket came back to me with a dark stain from his hand. +That any one should care in this heat whose flushed lips he kissed, +whose head made damp the pajama pocket over his heart! + +. . . Through the hall of the Buchanans' house blew a faint wind, +carrying the sound of the telephone bell out to Gatsby and me as we +waited at the door. + +"The master's body!" roared the butler into the mouthpiece. "I'm sorry, +madame, but we can't furnish it--it's far too hot to touch this noon!" + +What he really said was: "Yes . . . yes . . . I'll see." + +He set down the receiver and came toward us, glistening slightly, to take +our stiff straw hats. + +"Madame expects you in the salon!" he cried, needlessly indicating the +direction. In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the +common store of life. + +The room, shadowed well with awnings, was dark and cool. Daisy and +Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols, weighing down +their own white dresses against the singing breeze of the fans. + +"We can't move," they said together. + +Jordan's fingers, powdered white over their tan, rested for a moment in +mine. + +"And Mr. Thomas Buchanan, the athlete?" I inquired. + +Simultaneously I heard his voice, gruff, muffled, husky, at the hall +telephone. + +Gatsby stood in the center of the crimson carpet and gazed around with +fascinated eyes. Daisy watched him and laughed, her sweet, exciting +laugh; a tiny gust of powder rose from her bosom into the air. + +"The rumor is," whispered Jordan, "that that's Tom's girl on the +telephone." + +We were silent. The voice in the hall rose high with annoyance. +"Very well, then, I won't sell you the car at all. . . . I'm +under no obligations to you at all. . . . And as for your bothering me +about it at lunch time I won't stand that at all!" + +"Holding down the receiver," said Daisy cynically. + +"No, he's not," I assured her. "It's a bona fide deal. I happen to +know about it." + +Tom flung open the door, blocked out its space for a moment with his +thick body, and hurried into the room. + +"Mr. Gatsby!" He put out his broad, flat hand with well-concealed +dislike. "I'm glad to see you, sir. . . . Nick. . . ." + +"Make us a cold drink," cried Daisy. + +As he left the room again she got up and went over to Gatsby and pulled +his face down kissing him on the mouth. + +"You know I love you," she murmured. + +"You forget there's a lady present," said Jordan. + +Daisy looked around doubtfully. + +"You kiss Nick too." + +"What a low, vulgar girl!" + +"I don't care!" cried Daisy and began to clog on the brick fireplace. +Then she remembered the heat and sat down guiltily on the couch just as +a freshly laundered nurse leading a little girl came into the room. + +"Bles-sed pre-cious," she crooned, holding out her arms. "Come to your +own mother that loves you." + +The child, relinquished by the nurse, rushed across the room and rooted +shyly into her mother's dress. + +"The Bles-sed pre-cious! Did mother get powder on your old yellowy +hair? Stand up now, and say How-de-do." + +Gatsby and I in turn leaned down and took the small reluctant hand. +Afterward he kept looking at the child with surprise. I don't think he had +ever really believed in its existence before. + +"I got dressed before luncheon," said the child, turning eagerly to +Daisy. + +"That's because your mother wanted to show you off." Her face bent into +the single wrinkle of the small white neck. "You dream, you. You absolute +little dream." + +"Yes," admitted the child calmly. "Aunt Jordan's got on a white +dress too." + +"How do you like mother's friends?" Daisy turned her around so that she +faced Gatsby. "Do you think they're pretty?" + +"Where's Daddy?" + +"She doesn't look like her father," explained Daisy. "She looks like me. +She's got my hair and shape of the face." + +Daisy sat back upon the couch. The nurse took a step forward and held +out her hand. + +"Come, Pammy." + +"Goodbye, sweetheart!" + +With a reluctant backward glance the well-disciplined child held to her +nurse's hand and was pulled out the door, just as Tom came back, +preceding four gin rickeys that clicked full of ice. + +Gatsby took up his drink. + +"They certainly look cool," he said, with visible tension. + +We drank in long greedy swallows. + +"I read somewhere that the sun's getting hotter every year," said Tom +genially. "It seems that pretty soon the earth's going to fall into the +sun--or wait a minute--it's just the opposite--the sun's getting colder +every year. + +"Come outside," he suggested to Gatsby, "I'd like you to have a look at +the place." + +I went with them out to the veranda. On the green Sound, stagnant in the +heat, one small sail crawled slowly toward the fresher sea. Gatsby's eyes +followed it momentarily; he raised his hand and pointed across the bay. + +"I'm right across from you." + +"So you are." + +Our eyes lifted over the rosebeds and the hot lawn and the weedy refuse +of the dog days along shore. Slowly the white wings of the boat moved +against the blue cool limit of the sky. Ahead lay the scalloped ocean and +the abounding blessed isles. + +"There's sport for you," said Tom, nodding. "I'd like to be out there +with him for about an hour." + +We had luncheon in the dining-room, darkened, too, against the heat, +and drank down nervous gayety with the cold ale. + +"What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon," cried Daisy, "and the +day after that, and the next thirty years?" + +"Don't be morbid," Jordan said. "Life starts all over again when it gets +crisp in the fall." + +"But it's so hot," insisted Daisy, on the verge of tears, "And +everything's so confused. Let's all go to town!" + +Her voice struggled on through the heat, beating against it, moulding its +senselessness into forms. + +"I've heard of making a garage out of a stable," Tom was saying to +Gatsby, "but I'm the first man who ever made a stable out of a garage." + +"Who wants to go to town?" demanded Daisy insistently. Gatsby's eyes +floated toward her. "Ah," she cried, "you look so cool." + +Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. +With an effort she glanced down at the table. + +"You always look so cool," she repeated. + +She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw. He was +astounded. His mouth opened a little and he looked at Gatsby and then +back at Daisy as if he had just recognized her as some one he knew a +long time ago. + +"You resemble the advertisement of the man," she went on innocently. +"You know the advertisement of the man----" + +"All right," broke in Tom quickly, "I'm perfectly willing to go to +town. Come on--we're all going to town." + +He got up, his eyes still flashing between Gatsby and his wife. +No one moved. + +"Come on!" His temper cracked a little. "What's the matter, anyhow? +If we're going to town let's start." + +His hand, trembling with his effort at self control, bore to his lips the +last of his glass of ale. Daisy's voice got us to our feet and out on +to the blazing gravel drive. + +"Are we just going to go?" she objected. "Like this? Aren't we going to +let any one smoke a cigarette first?" + +"Everybody smoked all through lunch." + +"Oh, let's have fun," she begged him. "It's too hot to fuss." + +He didn't answer. + +"Have it your own way," she said. "Come on, Jordan." + +They went upstairs to get ready while we three men stood there shuffling +the hot pebbles with our feet. A silver curve of the moon hovered already +in the western sky. Gatsby started to speak, changed his mind, but not +before Tom wheeled and faced him expectantly. + +"Have you got your stables here?" asked Gatsby with an effort. + +"About a quarter of a mile down the road." + +"Oh." + +A pause. + +"I don't see the idea of going to town," broke out Tom savagely. +"Women get these notions in their heads----" + +"Shall we take anything to drink?" called Daisy from an upper window. + +"I'll get some whiskey," answered Tom. He went inside. + +Gatsby turned to me rigidly: + +"I can't say anything in his house, old sport." + +"She's got an indiscreet voice," I remarked. "It's full of----" + +I hesitated. + +"Her voice is full of money," he said suddenly. + +That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money--that was +the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the +cymbals' song of it. . . . High in a white palace the king's daughter, +the golden girl. . . . + +Tom came out of the house wrapping a quart bottle in a towel, followed +by Daisy and Jordan wearing small tight hats of metallic cloth and +carrying light capes over their arms. + +"Shall we all go in my car?" suggested Gatsby. He felt the hot, green +leather of the seat. "I ought to have left it in the shade." + +"Is it standard shift?" demanded Tom. + +"Yes." + +"Well, you take my coupé and let me drive your car to town." + +The suggestion was distasteful to Gatsby. + +"I don't think there's much gas," he objected. + +"Plenty of gas," said Tom boisterously. He looked at the gauge. +"And if it runs out I can stop at a drug store. You can buy anything at a +drug store nowadays." + +A pause followed this apparently pointless remark. Daisy looked at Tom +frowning and an indefinable expression, at once definitely unfamiliar +and vaguely recognizable, as if I had only heard it described in words, +passed over Gatsby's face. + +"Come on, Daisy," said Tom, pressing her with his hand toward Gatsby's +car. "I'll take you in this circus wagon." + +He opened the door but she moved out from the circle of his arm. + +"You take Nick and Jordan. We'll follow you in the coupé." + +She walked close to Gatsby, touching his coat with her hand. Jordan and +Tom and I got into the front seat of Gatsby's car, Tom pushed the +unfamiliar gears tentatively and we shot off into the oppressive heat +leaving them out of sight behind. + +"Did you see that?" demanded Tom. + +"See what?" + +He looked at me keenly, realizing that Jordan and I must have known all +along. + +"You think I'm pretty dumb, don't you?" he suggested. "Perhaps I am, but +I have a--almost a second sight, sometimes, that tells me what to do. +Maybe you don't believe that, but science----" + +He paused. The immediate contingency overtook him, pulled him back from +the edge of the theoretical abyss. + +"I've made a small investigation of this fellow," he continued. "I could +have gone deeper if I'd known----" + +"Do you mean you've been to a medium?" inquired Jordan humorously. + +"What?" Confused, he stared at us as we laughed. "A medium?" + +"About Gatsby." + +"About Gatsby! No, I haven't. I said I'd been making a small +investigation of his past." + +"And you found he was an Oxford man," said Jordan helpfully. + +"An Oxford man!" He was incredulous. "Like hell he is! He wears a +pink suit." + +"Nevertheless he's an Oxford man." + +"Oxford, New Mexico," snorted Tom contemptuously, "or something like +that." + +"Listen, Tom. If you're such a snob, why did you invite him to lunch?" +demanded Jordan crossly. + +"Daisy invited him; she knew him before we were married--God knows +where!" + +We were all irritable now with the fading ale and, aware of it, +we drove for a while in silence. Then as Doctor T. J. Eckleburg's faded +eyes came into sight down the road, I remembered Gatsby's caution about +gasoline. + +"We've got enough to get us to town," said Tom. + +"But there's a garage right here," objected Jordan. "I don't want to get +stalled in this baking heat." + +Tom threw on both brakes impatiently and we slid to an abrupt +dusty stop under Wilson's sign. After a moment the proprietor emerged +from the interior of his establishment and gazed hollow-eyed at the car. + +"Let's have some gas!" cried Tom roughly. "What do you think we stopped +for--to admire the view?" + +"I'm sick," said Wilson without moving. "I been sick all day." + +"What's the matter?" + +"I'm all run down." + +"Well, shall I help myself?" Tom demanded. "You sounded well enough +on the phone." + +With an effort Wilson left the shade and support of the doorway and, +breathing hard, unscrewed the cap of the tank. In the sunlight his face +was green. + +"I didn't mean to interrupt your lunch," he said. "But I need money +pretty bad and I was wondering what you were going to do with your +old car." + +"How do you like this one?" inquired Tom. "I bought it last week." + +"It's a nice yellow one," said Wilson, as he strained at the handle. + +"Like to buy it?" + +"Big chance," Wilson smiled faintly. "No, but I could make some money +on the other." + +"What do you want money for, all of a sudden?" + +"I've been here too long. I want to get away. My wife and I want to +go west." + +"Your wife does!" exclaimed Tom, startled. + +"She's been talking about it for ten years." He rested for a moment +against the pump, shading his eyes. "And now she's going whether she wants +to or not. I'm going to get her away." + +The coupé flashed by us with a flurry of dust and the flash of a +waving hand. + +"What do I owe you?" demanded Tom harshly. + +"I just got wised up to something funny the last two days," remarked +Wilson. "That's why I want to get away. That's why I been bothering you +about the car." + +"What do I owe you?" + +"Dollar twenty." + +The relentless beating heat was beginning to confuse me and I had +a bad moment there before I realized that so far his suspicions +hadn't alighted on Tom. He had discovered that Myrtle had some +sort of life apart from him in another world and the shock had +made him physically sick. I stared at him and then at Tom, who had made +a parallel discovery less than an hour before--and it occurred to me +that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so +profound as the difference between the sick and the well. Wilson was so +sick that he looked guilty, unforgivably guilty--as if he had just got +some poor girl with child. + +"I'll let you have that car," said Tom. "I'll send it over tomorrow +afternoon." + +That locality was always vaguely disquieting, even in the broad +glare of afternoon, and now I turned my head as though I had been +warned of something behind. Over the ashheaps the giant eyes of +Doctor T. J. Eckleburg kept their vigil but I perceived, after +a moment, that other eyes were regarding us with peculiar intensity +from less than twenty feet away. + +In one of the windows over the garage the curtains had been moved aside +a little and Myrtle Wilson was peering down at the car. So engrossed +was she that she had no consciousness of being observed and one +emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly +developing picture. Her expression was curiously familiar--it was an +expression I had often seen on women's faces but on Myrtle Wilson's +face it seemed purposeless and inexplicable until I realized that her +eyes, wide with jealous terror, were fixed not on Tom, but on Jordan +Baker, whom she took to be his wife. + + +There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind, and as we +drove away Tom was feeling the hot whips of panic. His wife and his +mistress, until an hour ago secure and inviolate, were slipping +precipitately from his control. Instinct made him step on the +accelerator with the double purpose of overtaking Daisy and leaving +Wilson behind, and we sped along toward Astoria at fifty miles an hour, +until, among the spidery girders of the elevated, we came in sight of +the easygoing blue coupé. + +"Those big movies around Fiftieth Street are cool," suggested Jordan. +"I love New York on summer afternoons when every one's away. There's +something very sensuous about it--overripe, as if all sorts of funny +fruits were going to fall into your hands." + +The word "sensuous" had the effect of further disquieting Tom but before +he could invent a protest the coupé came to a stop and Daisy signalled us +to draw up alongside. + +"Where are we going?" she cried. + +"How about the movies?" + +"It's so hot," she complained. "You go. We'll ride around and meet you +after." With an effort her wit rose faintly, "We'll meet you on some +corner. I'll be the man smoking two cigarettes." + +"We can't argue about it here," Tom said impatiently as a truck gave +out a cursing whistle behind us. "You follow me to the south side of +Central Park, in front of the Plaza." + +Several times he turned his head and looked back for their car, +and if the traffic delayed them he slowed up until they came into +sight. I think he was afraid they would dart down a side street and out +of his life forever. + +But they didn't. And we all took the less explicable step of engaging +the parlor of a suite in the Plaza Hotel. + +The prolonged and tumultuous argument that ended by herding us into +that room eludes me, though I have a sharp physical memory that, in the +course of it, my underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around my +legs and intermittent beads of sweat raced cool across my back. The +notion originated with Daisy's suggestion that we hire five bathrooms +and take cold baths, and then assumed more tangible form as "a place to +have a mint julep." Each of us said over and over that it was a "crazy +idea"--we all talked at once to a baffled clerk and thought, or +pretended to think, that we were being very funny. . . . + +The room was large and stifling, and, though it was already four +o'clock, opening the windows admitted only a gust of hot shrubbery from +the Park. Daisy went to the mirror and stood with her back to us, +fixing her hair. + +"It's a swell suite," whispered Jordan respectfully and every one +laughed. + +"Open another window," commanded Daisy, without turning around. + +"There aren't any more." + +"Well, we'd better telephone for an axe----" + +"The thing to do is to forget about the heat," said Tom impatiently. +"You make it ten times worse by crabbing about it." + +He unrolled the bottle of whiskey from the towel and put it on the table. + +"Why not let her alone, old sport?" remarked Gatsby. "You're the one that +wanted to come to town." + +There was a moment of silence. The telephone book slipped from its nail +and splashed to the floor, whereupon Jordan whispered "Excuse me"--but +this time no one laughed. + +"I'll pick it up," I offered. + +"I've got it." Gatsby examined the parted string, muttered "Hum!" in an +interested way, and tossed the book on a chair. + +"That's a great expression of yours, isn't it?" said Tom sharply. + +"What is?" + +"All this 'old sport' business. Where'd you pick that up?" + +"Now see here, Tom," said Daisy, turning around from the mirror, "if +you're going to make personal remarks I won't stay here a minute. Call +up and order some ice for the mint julep." + +As Tom took up the receiver the compressed heat exploded into sound and +we were listening to the portentous chords of Mendelssohn's Wedding March +from the ballroom below. + +"Imagine marrying anybody in this heat!" cried Jordan dismally. + +"Still--I was married in the middle of June," Daisy remembered, +"Louisville in June! Somebody fainted. Who was it fainted, Tom?" + +"Biloxi," he answered shortly. + +"A man named Biloxi. 'Blocks' Biloxi, and he made boxes--that's a +fact--and he was from Biloxi, Tennessee." + +"They carried him into my house," appended Jordan, "because we lived +just two doors from the church. And he stayed three weeks, until Daddy +told him he had to get out. The day after he left Daddy died." After a +moment she added as if she might have sounded irreverent, "There +wasn't any connection." + +"I used to know a Bill Biloxi from Memphis," I remarked. + +"That was his cousin. I knew his whole family history before he left. +He gave me an aluminum putter that I use today." + +The music had died down as the ceremony began and now a long cheer floated +in at the window, followed by intermittent cries of "Yea--ea--ea!" +and finally by a burst of jazz as the dancing began. + +"We're getting old," said Daisy. "If we were young we'd rise and dance." + +"Remember Biloxi," Jordan warned her. "Where'd you know him, Tom?" + +"Biloxi?" He concentrated with an effort. "I didn't know him. He was a +friend of Daisy's." + +"He was not," she denied. "I'd never seen him before. He came down in +the private car." + +"Well, he said he knew you. He said he was raised in Louisville. +Asa Bird brought him around at the last minute and asked if we had room +for him." + +Jordan smiled. + +"He was probably bumming his way home. He told me he was president of +your class at Yale." + +Tom and I looked at each other blankly. + +"BilOxi?" + +"First place, we didn't have any president----" + +Gatsby's foot beat a short, restless tattoo and Tom eyed him suddenly. + +"By the way, Mr. Gatsby, I understand you're an Oxford man." + +"Not exactly." + +"Oh, yes, I understand you went to Oxford." + +"Yes--I went there." + +A pause. Then Tom's voice, incredulous and insulting: + +"You must have gone there about the time Biloxi went to New Haven." + +Another pause. A waiter knocked and came in with crushed mint and ice but +the silence was unbroken by his "Thank you" and the soft closing of the +door. This tremendous detail was to be cleared up at last. + +"I told you I went there," said Gatsby. + +"I heard you, but I'd like to know when." + +"It was in nineteen-nineteen, I only stayed five months. That's why I +can't really call myself an Oxford man." + +Tom glanced around to see if we mirrored his unbelief. But we were all +looking at Gatsby. + +"It was an opportunity they gave to some of the officers after the +Armistice," he continued. "We could go to any of the universities in +England or France." + +I wanted to get up and slap him on the back. I had one of those renewals +of complete faith in him that I'd experienced before. + +Daisy rose, smiling faintly, and went to the table. + +"Open the whiskey, Tom," she ordered. "And I'll make you a mint julep. +Then you won't seem so stupid to yourself. . . . Look at the mint!" + +"Wait a minute," snapped Tom, "I want to ask Mr. Gatsby one more +question." + +"Go on," Gatsby said politely. + +"What kind of a row are you trying to cause in my house anyhow?" + +They were out in the open at last and Gatsby was content. + +"He isn't causing a row." Daisy looked desperately from one to the +other. "You're causing a row. Please have a little self control." + +"Self control!" repeated Tom incredulously. "I suppose the latest thing +is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. +Well, if that's the idea you can count me out. . . . Nowadays people begin +by sneering at family life and family institutions and next they'll +throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black +and white." + +Flushed with his impassioned gibberish he saw himself standing alone on +the last barrier of civilization. + +"We're all white here," murmured Jordan. + +"I know I'm not very popular. I don't give big parties. I suppose +you've got to make your house into a pigsty in order to have any +friends--in the modern world." + +Angry as I was, as we all were, I was tempted to laugh whenever he opened +his mouth. The transition from libertine to prig was so complete. + +"I've got something to tell YOU, old sport,----" began Gatsby. But Daisy +guessed at his intention. + +"Please don't!" she interrupted helplessly. "Please let's all go home. +Why don't we all go home?" + +"That's a good idea." I got up. "Come on, Tom. Nobody wants a drink." + +"I want to know what Mr. Gatsby has to tell me." + +"Your wife doesn't love you," said Gatsby. "She's never loved you. +She loves me." + +"You must be crazy!" exclaimed Tom automatically. + +Gatsby sprang to his feet, vivid with excitement. + +"She never loved you, do you hear?" he cried. "She only married you +because I was poor and she was tired of waiting for me. It was a terrible +mistake, but in her heart she never loved any one except me!" + +At this point Jordan and I tried to go but Tom and Gatsby insisted with +competitive firmness that we remain--as though neither of them had +anything to conceal and it would be a privilege to partake vicariously +of their emotions. + +"Sit down Daisy." Tom's voice groped unsuccessfully for the paternal +note. "What's been going on? I want to hear all about it." + +"I told you what's been going on," said Gatsby. "Going on for five +years--and you didn't know." + +Tom turned to Daisy sharply. + +"You've been seeing this fellow for five years?" + +"Not seeing," said Gatsby. "No, we couldn't meet. But both of us loved +each other all that time, old sport, and you didn't know. I used to laugh +sometimes--"but there was no laughter in his eyes, "to think that you +didn't know." + +"Oh--that's all." Tom tapped his thick fingers together like a clergyman +and leaned back in his chair. + +"You're crazy!" he exploded. "I can't speak about what happened five years +ago, because I didn't know Daisy then--and I'll be damned if I see how you +got within a mile of her unless you brought the groceries to the back +door. But all the rest of that's a God Damned lie. Daisy loved me when +she married me and she loves me now." + +"No," said Gatsby, shaking his head. + +"She does, though. The trouble is that sometimes she gets foolish ideas +in her head and doesn't know what she's doing." He nodded sagely. "And +what's more, I love Daisy too. Once in a while I go off on a spree +and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I +love her all the time." + +"You're revolting," said Daisy. She turned to me, and her voice, +dropping an octave lower, filled the room with thrilling scorn: "Do you +know why we left Chicago? I'm surprised that they didn't treat you to +the story of that little spree." + +Gatsby walked over and stood beside her. + +"Daisy, that's all over now," he said earnestly. "It doesn't matter any +more. Just tell him the truth--that you never loved him--and it's all +wiped out forever." + +She looked at him blindly. "Why,--how could I love him--possibly?" + +"You never loved him." + +She hesitated. Her eyes fell on Jordan and me with a sort of appeal, +as though she realized at last what she was doing--and as though she had +never, all along, intended doing anything at all. But it was done now. +It was too late. + +"I never loved him," she said, with perceptible reluctance. + +"Not at Kapiolani?" demanded Tom suddenly. + +"No." + +From the ballroom beneath, muffled and suffocating chords were drifting up +on hot waves of air. + +"Not that day I carried you down from the Punch Bowl to keep your shoes +dry?" There was a husky tenderness in his tone. ". . . Daisy?" + +"Please don't." Her voice was cold, but the rancour was gone from it. +She looked at Gatsby. "There, Jay," she said--but her hand as she tried +to light a cigarette was trembling. Suddenly she threw the cigarette and +the burning match on the carpet. + +"Oh, you want too much!" she cried to Gatsby. "I love you now--isn't that +enough? I can't help what's past." She began to sob helplessly. +"I did love him once--but I loved you too." + +Gatsby's eyes opened and closed. + +"You loved me TOO?" he repeated. + +"Even that's a lie," said Tom savagely. "She didn't know you were alive. +Why,--there're things between Daisy and me that you'll never know, +things that neither of us can ever forget." + +The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby. + +"I want to speak to Daisy alone," he insisted. "She's all excited now----" + +"Even alone I can't say I never loved Tom," she admitted in a pitiful +voice. "It wouldn't be true." + +"Of course it wouldn't," agreed Tom. + +She turned to her husband. + +"As if it mattered to you," she said. + +"Of course it matters. I'm going to take better care of you from now on." + +"You don't understand," said Gatsby, with a touch of panic. "You're not +going to take care of her any more." + +"I'm not?" Tom opened his eyes wide and laughed. He could afford to +control himself now. "Why's that?" + +"Daisy's leaving you." + +"Nonsense." + +"I am, though," she said with a visible effort. + +"She's not leaving me!" Tom's words suddenly leaned down over Gatsby. +"Certainly not for a common swindler who'd have to steal the ring he +put on her finger." + +"I won't stand this!" cried Daisy. "Oh, please let's get out." + +"Who are you, anyhow?" broke out Tom. "You're one of that bunch that +hangs around with Meyer Wolfshiem--that much I happen to know. I've made +a little investigation into your affairs--and I'll carry it further +tomorrow." + +"You can suit yourself about that, old sport." said Gatsby steadily. + +"I found out what your 'drug stores' were." He turned to us and spoke +rapidly. "He and this Wolfshiem bought up a lot of side-street drug stores +here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter. That's one of +his little stunts. I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw +him and I wasn't far wrong." + +"What about it?" said Gatsby politely. "I guess your friend Walter Chase +wasn't too proud to come in on it." + +"And you left him in the lurch, didn't you? You let him go to jail for +a month over in New Jersey. God! You ought to hear Walter on the subject +of YOU." + +"He came to us dead broke. He was very glad to pick up some money, old +sport." + +"Don't you call me 'old sport'!" cried Tom. Gatsby said nothing. +"Walter could have you up on the betting laws too, but Wolfshiem scared +him into shutting his mouth." + +That unfamiliar yet recognizable look was back again in Gatsby's face. + +"That drug store business was just small change," continued Tom slowly, +"but you've got something on now that Walter's afraid to tell me +about." + +I glanced at Daisy who was staring terrified between Gatsby +and her husband and at Jordan who had begun to balance an invisible +but absorbing object on the tip of her chin. Then I turned back to +Gatsby--and was startled at his expression. He looked--and this is said +in all contempt for the babbled slander of his garden--as if he had +"killed a man." For a moment the set of his face could be described in +just that fantastic way. + +It passed, and he began to talk excitedly to Daisy, denying everything, +defending his name against accusations that had not been made. But with +every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave +that up and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped +away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling +unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room. + +The voice begged again to go. + +"PLEASE, Tom! I can't stand this any more." + +Her frightened eyes told that whatever intentions, whatever courage +she had had, were definitely gone. + +"You two start on home, Daisy," said Tom. "In Mr. Gatsby's car." + +She looked at Tom, alarmed now, but he insisted with magnanimous scorn. + +"Go on. He won't annoy you. I think he realizes that his presumptuous +little flirtation is over." + +They were gone, without a word, snapped out, made accidental, isolated, +like ghosts even from our pity. + +After a moment Tom got up and began wrapping the unopened bottle of +whiskey in the towel. + +"Want any of this stuff? Jordan? . . . Nick?" + +I didn't answer. + +"Nick?" He asked again. + +"What?" + +"Want any?" + +"No . . . I just remembered that today's my birthday." + +I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous menacing road of a +new decade. + +It was seven o'clock when we got into the coupé with him and started +for Long Island. Tom talked incessantly, exulting and laughing, but his +voice was as remote from Jordan and me as the foreign clamor on the +sidewalk or the tumult of the elevated overhead. Human sympathy +has its limits and we were content to let all their tragic arguments +fade with the city lights behind. Thirty--the promise of a decade +of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning +brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside +me who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten +dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face +fell lazily against my coat's shoulder and the formidable stroke of +thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand. + +So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight. + + +The young Greek, Michaelis, who ran the coffee joint beside the +ashheaps was the principal witness at the inquest. He had slept through +the heat until after five, when he strolled over to the garage and +found George Wilson sick in his office--really sick, pale as his own +pale hair and shaking all over. Michaelis advised him to go to bed but +Wilson refused, saying that he'd miss a lot of business if he did. +While his neighbor was trying to persuade him a violent racket broke +out overhead. + +"I've got my wife locked in up there," explained Wilson calmly. +"She's going to stay there till the day after tomorrow and then we're +going to move away." + +Michaelis was astonished; they had been neighbors for four years and +Wilson had never seemed faintly capable of such a statement. Generally +he was one of these worn-out men: when he wasn't working he sat on a +chair in the doorway and stared at the people and the cars that passed +along the road. When any one spoke to him he invariably laughed in an +agreeable, colorless way. He was his wife's man and not his own. + +So naturally Michaelis tried to find out what had happened, but Wilson +wouldn't say a word--instead he began to throw curious, suspicious +glances at his visitor and ask him what he'd been doing at certain +times on certain days. Just as the latter was getting uneasy some +workmen came past the door bound for his restaurant and Michaelis took +the opportunity to get away, intending to come back later. But he didn't. +He supposed he forgot to, that's all. When he came outside again +a little after seven he was reminded of the conversation because he +heard Mrs. Wilson's voice, loud and scolding, downstairs in the garage. + +"Beat me!" he heard her cry. "Throw me down and beat me, you dirty +little coward!" + +A moment later she rushed out into the dusk, waving her hands and +shouting; before he could move from his door the business was over. + +The "death car" as the newspapers called it, didn't stop; it came out +of the gathering darkness, wavered tragically for a moment and then +disappeared around the next bend. Michaelis wasn't even sure of its +color--he told the first policeman that it was light green. The other +car, the one going toward New York, came to rest a hundred yards +beyond, and its driver hurried back to where Myrtle Wilson, her life +violently extinguished, knelt in the road and mingled her thick, dark +blood with the dust. + +Michaelis and this man reached her first but when they had torn open +her shirtwaist still damp with perspiration, they saw that her left +breast was swinging loose like a flap and there was no need to listen +for the heart beneath. The mouth was wide open and ripped at the +corners as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous +vitality she had stored so long. + + +We saw the three or four automobiles and the crowd when we were still +some distance away. + +"Wreck!" said Tom. "That's good. Wilson'll have a little business +at last." + +He slowed down, but still without any intention of stopping until, +as we came nearer, the hushed intent faces of the people at the garage +door made him automatically put on the brakes. + +"We'll take a look," he said doubtfully, "just a look." + +I became aware now of a hollow, wailing sound which issued incessantly +from the garage, a sound which as we got out of the coupé and walked +toward the door resolved itself into the words "Oh, my God!" uttered over +and over in a gasping moan. + +"There's some bad trouble here," said Tom excitedly. + +He reached up on tiptoes and peered over a circle of heads into the +garage which was lit only by a yellow light in a swinging wire basket +overhead. Then he made a harsh sound in his throat and with a violent +thrusting movement of his powerful arms pushed his way through. + +The circle closed up again with a running murmur of expostulation; it +was a minute before I could see anything at all. Then new arrivals +disarranged the line and Jordan and I were pushed suddenly inside. + +Myrtle Wilson's body wrapped in a blanket and then in another +blanket as though she suffered from a chill in the hot night lay on a +work table by the wall and Tom, with his back to us, was bending over +it, motionless. Next to him stood a motorcycle policeman taking down +names with much sweat and correction in a little book. At first I +couldn't find the source of the high, groaning words that echoed +clamorously through the bare garage--then I saw Wilson standing on the +raised threshold of his office, swaying back and forth and holding to +the doorposts with both hands. Some man was talking to him in a low +voice and attempting from time to time to lay a hand on his shoulder, +but Wilson neither heard nor saw. His eyes would drop slowly from the +swinging light to the laden table by the wall and then jerk back to +the light again and he gave out incessantly his high horrible call. + +"O, my Ga-od! O, my Ga-od! Oh, Ga-od! Oh, my Ga-od!" + +Presently Tom lifted his head with a jerk and after staring around the +garage with glazed eyes addressed a mumbled incoherent remark to the +policeman. + +"M-a-v--" the policeman was saying, "--o----" + +"No,--r--" corrected the man, "M-a-v-r-o----" + +"Listen to me!" muttered Tom fiercely. + +"r--" said the policeman, "o----" + +"g----" + +"g--" He looked up as Tom's broad hand fell sharply on his shoulder. +"What you want, fella?" + +"What happened--that's what I want to know!" + +"Auto hit her. Ins'antly killed." + +"Instantly killed," repeated Tom, staring. + +"She ran out ina road. Son-of-a-bitch didn't even stopus car." + +"There was two cars," said Michaelis, "one comin', one goin', see?" + +"Going where?" asked the policeman keenly. + +"One goin' each way. Well, she--" His hand rose toward the blankets but +stopped half way and fell to his side, "--she ran out there an' the one +comin' from N'York knock right into her goin' thirty or forty miles an +hour." + +"What's the name of this place here?" demanded the officer. + +"Hasn't got any name." + +A pale, well-dressed Negro stepped near. + +"It was a yellow car," he said, "big yellow car. New." + +"See the accident?" asked the policeman. + +"No, but the car passed me down the road, going faster'n forty. Going +fifty, sixty." + +"Come here and let's have your name. Look out now. I want to get his +name." + +Some words of this conversation must have reached Wilson swaying +in the office door, for suddenly a new theme found voice among +his gasping cries. + +"You don't have to tell me what kind of car it was! I know what kind of +car it was!" + +Watching Tom I saw the wad of muscle back of his shoulder tighten +under his coat. He walked quickly over to Wilson and standing +in front of him seized him firmly by the upper arms. + +"You've got to pull yourself together," he said with soothing +gruffness. + +Wilson's eyes fell upon Tom; he started up on his tiptoes and then +would have collapsed to his knees had not Tom held him upright. + +"Listen," said Tom, shaking him a little. "I just got here a minute ago, +from New York. I was bringing you that coupé we've been talking about. +That yellow car I was driving this afternoon wasn't mine, do you hear? I +haven't seen it all afternoon." + +Only the Negro and I were near enough to hear what he said but the +policeman caught something in the tone and looked over with truculent +eyes. + +"What's all that?" he demanded. + +"I'm a friend of his." Tom turned his head but kept his hands firm on +Wilson's body. "He says he knows the car that did it. . . . It was a yellow +car." + +Some dim impulse moved the policeman to look suspiciously at Tom. + +"And what color's your car?" + +"It's a blue car, a coupé." + +"We've come straight from New York," I said. + +Some one who had been driving a little behind us confirmed this and +the policeman turned away. + +"Now, if you'll let me have that name again correct----" + +Picking up Wilson like a doll Tom carried him into the office, +set him down in a chair and came back. + +"If somebody'll come here and sit with him!" he snapped +authoritatively. He watched while the two men standing closest glanced +at each other and went unwillingly into the room. Then Tom shut the +door on them and came down the single step, his eyes avoiding the +table. As he passed close to me he whispered "Let's get out." + +Self consciously, with his authoritative arms breaking the way, we +pushed through the still gathering crowd, passing a hurried doctor, +case in hand, who had been sent for in wild hope half an hour ago. + +Tom drove slowly until we were beyond the bend--then his foot came down +hard and the coupé raced along through the night. In a little while I +heard a low husky sob and saw that the tears were overflowing down his +face. + +"The God Damn coward!" he whimpered. "He didn't even stop his car." + + +The Buchanans' house floated suddenly toward us through the dark rustling +trees. Tom stopped beside the porch and looked up at the second floor +where two windows bloomed with light among the vines. + +"Daisy's home," he said. As we got out of the car he glanced at me and +frowned slightly. + +"I ought to have dropped you in West Egg, Nick. There's nothing we can +do tonight." + +A change had come over him and he spoke gravely, and with decision. +As we walked across the moonlight gravel to the porch he disposed of +the situation in a few brisk phrases. + +"I'll telephone for a taxi to take you home, and while you're waiting +you and Jordan better go in the kitchen and have them get you some +supper--if you want any." He opened the door. "Come in." + +"No thanks. But I'd be glad if you'd order me the taxi. I'll wait +outside." + +Jordan put her hand on my arm. + +"Won't you come in, Nick?" + +"No thanks." + +I was feeling a little sick and I wanted to be alone. But Jordan lingered +for a moment more. + +"It's only half past nine," she said. + +I'd be damned if I'd go in; I'd had enough of all of them for one day +and suddenly that included Jordan too. She must have seen something of +this in my expression for she turned abruptly away and ran up the +porch steps into the house. I sat down for a few minutes with my head +in my hands, until I heard the phone taken up inside and the butler's +voice calling a taxi. Then I walked slowly down the drive away from the +house intending to wait by the gate. + +I hadn't gone twenty yards when I heard my name and Gatsby stepped from +between two bushes into the path. I must have felt pretty weird by that +time because I could think of nothing except the luminosity of his +pink suit under the moon. + +"What are you doing?" I inquired. + +"Just standing here, old sport." + +Somehow, that seemed a despicable occupation. For all I knew he was going +to rob the house in a moment; I wouldn't have been surprised to see +sinister faces, the faces of "Wolfshiem's people," behind him in the +dark shrubbery. + +"Did you see any trouble on the road?" he asked after a minute. + +"Yes." + +He hesitated. + +"Was she killed?" + +"Yes." + +"I thought so; I told Daisy I thought so. It's better that the shock +should all come at once. She stood it pretty well." + +He spoke as if Daisy's reaction was the only thing that mattered. + +"I got to West Egg by a side road," he went on, "and left the car in my +garage. I don't think anybody saw us but of course I can't be sure." + +I disliked him so much by this time that I didn't find it necessary to +tell him he was wrong. + +"Who was the woman?" he inquired. + +"Her name was Wilson. Her husband owns the garage. How the devil did it +happen?" + +"Well, I tried to swing the wheel----" He broke off, and suddenly I +guessed at the truth. + +"Was Daisy driving?" + +"Yes," he said after a moment, "but of course I'll say I was. You see, +when we left New York she was very nervous and she thought it would +steady her to drive--and this woman rushed out at us just as we were +passing a car coming the other way. It all happened in a minute but it +seemed to me that she wanted to speak to us, thought we were somebody +she knew. Well, first Daisy turned away from the woman toward the other +car, and then she lost her nerve and turned back. The second my hand +reached the wheel I felt the shock--it must have killed her instantly." + +"It ripped her open----" + +"Don't tell me, old sport." He winced. "Anyhow--Daisy stepped on it. +I tried to make her stop, but she couldn't so I pulled on the emergency +brake. Then she fell over into my lap and I drove on. + +"She'll be all right tomorrow," he said presently. "I'm just going to +wait here and see if he tries to bother her about that unpleasantness +this afternoon. She's locked herself into her room and if he tries any +brutality she's going to turn the light out and on again." + +"He won't touch her," I said. "He's not thinking about her." + +"I don't trust him, old sport." + +"How long are you going to wait?" + +"All night if necessary. Anyhow till they all go to bed." + +A new point of view occurred to me. Suppose Tom found out that Daisy had +been driving. He might think he saw a connection in it--he might think +anything. I looked at the house: there were two or three bright windows +downstairs and the pink glow from Daisy's room on the second floor. + +"You wait here," I said. "I'll see if there's any sign of a commotion." + +I walked back along the border of the lawn, traversed the gravel softly +and tiptoed up the veranda steps. The drawing-room curtains were open, +and I saw that the room was empty. Crossing the porch where we had dined +that June night three months before I came to a small rectangle of light +which I guessed was the pantry window. The blind was drawn but I found +a rift at the sill. + +Daisy and Tom were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table +with a plate of cold fried chicken between them and two bottles of +ale. He was talking intently across the table at her and in his +earnestness his hand had fallen upon and covered her own. Once in a +while she looked up at him and nodded in agreement. + +They weren't happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the +ale--and yet they weren't unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air +of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that +they were conspiring together. + +As I tiptoed from the porch I heard my taxi feeling its way along the +dark road toward the house. Gatsby was waiting where I had left him in +the drive. + +"Is it all quiet up there?" he asked anxiously. + +"Yes, it's all quiet." I hesitated. "You'd better come home and get +some sleep." + +He shook his head. + +"I want to wait here till Daisy goes to bed. Good night, old sport." + +He put his hands in his coat pockets and turned back eagerly to his +scrutiny of the house, as though my presence marred the sacredness of +the vigil. So I walked away and left him standing there in the +moonlight--watching over nothing. + + + + +Chapter 8 + + + +I couldn't sleep all night; a fog-horn was groaning incessantly on the +Sound, and I tossed half-sick between grotesque reality and savage +frightening dreams. Toward dawn I heard a taxi go up Gatsby's drive +and immediately I jumped out of bed and began to dress--I felt that I +had something to tell him, something to warn him about and morning +would be too late. + +Crossing his lawn I saw that his front door was still open and he was +leaning against a table in the hall, heavy with dejection or sleep. + +"Nothing happened," he said wanly. "I waited, and about four o'clock she +came to the window and stood there for a minute and then turned out +the light." + +His house had never seemed so enormous to me as it did that night when we +hunted through the great rooms for cigarettes. We pushed aside curtains +that were like pavilions and felt over innumerable feet of dark wall for +electric light switches--once I tumbled with a sort of splash upon the +keys of a ghostly piano. There was an inexplicable amount of dust +everywhere and the rooms were musty as though they hadn't been aired for +many days. I found the humidor on an unfamiliar table with two stale dry +cigarettes inside. Throwing open the French windows of the +drawing-room we sat smoking out into the darkness. + +"You ought to go away," I said. "It's pretty certain they'll trace +your car." + +"Go away NOW, old sport?" + +"Go to Atlantic City for a week, or up to Montreal." + +He wouldn't consider it. He couldn't possibly leave Daisy until he knew +what she was going to do. He was clutching at some last hope and I +couldn't bear to shake him free. + +It was this night that he told me the strange story of his youth with +Dan Cody--told it to me because "Jay Gatsby" had broken up like glass +against Tom's hard malice and the long secret extravaganza was played +out. I think that he would have acknowledged anything, now, without +reserve, but he wanted to talk about Daisy. + +She was the first "nice" girl he had ever known. In various unrevealed +capacities he had come in contact with such people but always +with indiscernible barbed wire between. He found her excitingly +desirable. He went to her house, at first with other officers +from Camp Taylor, then alone. It amazed him--he had never been +in such a beautiful house before. But what gave it an air of breathless +intensity was that Daisy lived there--it was as casual a thing to her +as his tent out at camp was to him. There was a ripe mystery about it, +a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other +bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its +corridors and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in +lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year's shining +motor cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered. It +excited him too that many men had already loved Daisy--it increased +her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about the house, +pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions. + +But he knew that he was in Daisy's house by a colossal accident. +However glorious might be his future as Jay Gatsby, he was at present a +penniless young man without a past, and at any moment the invisible +cloak of his uniform might slip from his shoulders. So he made +the most of his time. He took what he could get, ravenously and +unscrupulously--eventually he took Daisy one still October night, +took her because he had no real right to touch her hand. + +He might have despised himself, for he had certainly taken her under +false pretenses. I don't mean that he had traded on his phantom +millions, but he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he +let her believe that he was a person from much the same stratum as +herself--that he was fully able to take care of her. As a matter of +fact he had no such facilities--he had no comfortable family standing +behind him and he was liable at the whim of an impersonal government +to be blown anywhere about the world. + +But he didn't despise himself and it didn't turn out as he had +imagined. He had intended, probably, to take what he could and go--but +now he found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail. +He knew that Daisy was extraordinary but he didn't realize just how +extraordinary a "nice" girl could be. She vanished into her rich +house, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby--nothing. He felt +married to her, that was all. + +When they met again two days later it was Gatsby who was breathless, +who was somehow betrayed. Her porch was bright with the bought +luxury of star-shine; the wicker of the settee squeaked fashionably +as she turned toward him and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth. +She had caught a cold and it made her voice huskier and more charming +than ever and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery +that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes +and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot +struggles of the poor. + + +"I can't describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, +old sport. I even hoped for a while that she'd throw me over, but she +didn't, because she was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot +because I knew different things from her. . . . Well, there I was, +way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and +all of a sudden I didn't care. What was the use of doing great +things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going +to do?" + +On the last afternoon before he went abroad he sat with Daisy in +his arms for a long, silent time. It was a cold fall day with fire +in the room and her cheeks flushed. Now and then she moved and he +changed his arm a little and once he kissed her dark shining hair. The +afternoon had made them tranquil for a while as if to give them a deep +memory for the long parting the next day promised. They had never been +closer in their month of love nor communicated more profoundly one +with another than when she brushed silent lips against his coat's +shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though +she were asleep. + + +He did extraordinarily well in the war. He was a captain before he went +to the front and following the Argonne battles he got his majority and +the command of the divisional machine guns. After the Armistice +he tried frantically to get home but some complication or +misunderstanding sent him to Oxford instead. He was worried now--there +was a quality of nervous despair in Daisy's letters. She didn't see why +he couldn't come. She was feeling the pressure of the world outside +and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be +reassured that she was doing the right thing after all. + +For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids +and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of +the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new +tunes. All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the +"Beale Street Blues" while a hundred pairs of golden and silver +slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the grey tea hour there were +always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low sweet fever, +while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the +sad horns around the floor. + +Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the +season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with +half a dozen men and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and +chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor +beside her bed. And all the time something within her was crying for a +decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately--and the decision +must be made by some force--of love, of money, of unquestionable +practicality--that was close at hand. + +That force took shape in the middle of spring with the arrival of Tom +Buchanan. There was a wholesome bulkiness about his person and his +position and Daisy was flattered. Doubtless there was a certain +struggle and a certain relief. The letter reached Gatsby while he was +still at Oxford. + + +It was dawn now on Long Island and we went about opening the rest of +the windows downstairs, filling the house with grey turning, +gold turning light. The shadow of a tree fell abruptly across the dew +and ghostly birds began to sing among the blue leaves. There was a +slow pleasant movement in the air, scarcely a wind, promising a cool +lovely day. + +"I don't think she ever loved him." Gatsby turned around from a window +and looked at me challengingly. "You must remember, old sport, she was +very excited this afternoon. He told her those things in a way that +frightened her--that made it look as if I was some kind of cheap sharper. +And the result was she hardly knew what she was saying." + +He sat down gloomily. + +"Of course she might have loved him, just for a minute, when they were +first married--and loved me more even then, do you see?" + +Suddenly he came out with a curious remark: + +"In any case," he said, "it was just personal." + +What could you make of that, except to suspect some intensity in +his conception of the affair that couldn't be measured? + +He came back from France when Tom and Daisy were still on their wedding +trip, and made a miserable but irresistible journey to Louisville +on the last of his army pay. He stayed there a week, walking the +streets where their footsteps had clicked together through the +November night and revisiting the out-of-the-way places to which +they had driven in her white car. Just as Daisy's house had always +seemed to him more mysterious and gay than other houses so his +idea of the city itself, even though she was gone from it, was pervaded +with a melancholy beauty. + +He left feeling that if he had searched harder he might have found +her--that he was leaving her behind. The day-coach--he was penniless +now--was hot. He went out to the open vestibule and sat down on a +folding-chair, and the station slid away and the backs of unfamiliar +buildings moved by. Then out into the spring fields, where a yellow +trolley raced them for a minute with people in it who might once have +seen the pale magic of her face along the casual street. + +The track curved and now it was going away from the sun which, as it +sank lower, seemed to spread itself in benediction over the vanishing +city where she had drawn her breath. He stretched out his hand +desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of +the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too +fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of +it, the freshest and the best, forever. + + +It was nine o'clock when we finished breakfast and went out on the +porch. The night had made a sharp difference in the weather and there +was an autumn flavor in the air. The gardener, the last one of Gatsby's +former servants, came to the foot of the steps. + +"I'm going to drain the pool today, Mr. Gatsby. Leaves'll start falling +pretty soon and then there's always trouble with the pipes." + +"Don't do it today," Gatsby answered. He turned to me apologetically. +"You know, old sport, I've never used that pool all summer?" + +I looked at my watch and stood up. + +"Twelve minutes to my train." + +I didn't want to go to the city. I wasn't worth a decent stroke of work +but it was more than that--I didn't want to leave Gatsby. I missed that +train, and then another, before I could get myself away. + +"I'll call you up," I said finally. + +"Do, old sport." + +"I'll call you about noon." + +We walked slowly down the steps. + +"I suppose Daisy'll call too." He looked at me anxiously as if he +hoped I'd corroborate this. + +"I suppose so." + +"Well--goodbye." + +We shook hands and I started away. Just before I reached the hedge I +remembered something and turned around. + +"They're a rotten crowd," I shouted across the lawn. "You're worth the +whole damn bunch put together." + +I've always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave +him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. First he nodded +politely, and then his face broke into that radiant and understanding +smile, as if we'd been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all the time. +His gorgeous pink rag of a suit made a bright spot of color against the +white steps and I thought of the night when I first came to his ancestral +home three months before. The lawn and drive had been crowded with the +faces of those who guessed at his corruption--and he had stood on those +steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them goodbye. + +I thanked him for his hospitality. We were always thanking him for +that--I and the others. + +"Goodbye," I called. "I enjoyed breakfast, Gatsby." + + +Up in the city I tried for a while to list the quotations on an +interminable amount of stock, then I fell asleep in my swivel-chair. +Just before noon the phone woke me and I started up with sweat +breaking out on my forehead. It was Jordan Baker; she often called +me up at this hour because the uncertainty of her own movements +between hotels and clubs and private houses made her hard to find +in any other way. Usually her voice came over the wire as something +fresh and cool as if a divot from a green golf links had come +sailing in at the office window but this morning it seemed harsh and dry. + +"I've left Daisy's house," she said. "I'm at Hempstead and I'm going down +to Southampton this afternoon." + +Probably it had been tactful to leave Daisy's house, but the act +annoyed me and her next remark made me rigid. + +"You weren't so nice to me last night." + +"How could it have mattered then?" + +Silence for a moment. Then-- + +"However--I want to see you." + +"I want to see you too." + +"Suppose I don't go to Southampton, and come into town this afternoon?" + +"No--I don't think this afternoon." + +"Very well." + +"It's impossible this afternoon. Various----" + +We talked like that for a while and then abruptly we weren't talking any +longer. I don't know which of us hung up with a sharp click but I know I +didn't care. I couldn't have talked to her across a tea-table that day if +I never talked to her again in this world. + +I called Gatsby's house a few minutes later, but the line was busy. I +tried four times; finally an exasperated central told me the wire was +being kept open for long distance from Detroit. Taking out my +time-table I drew a small circle around the three-fifty train. Then I +leaned back in my chair and tried to think. It was just noon. + + +When I passed the ashheaps on the train that morning I had crossed +deliberately to the other side of the car. I suppose there'd be a +curious crowd around there all day with little boys searching for dark +spots in the dust and some garrulous man telling over and over what +had happened until it became less and less real even to him and he +could tell it no longer and Myrtle Wilson's tragic achievement was +forgotten. Now I want to go back a little and tell what happened at the +garage after we left there the night before. + +They had difficulty in locating the sister, Catherine. She must +have broken her rule against drinking that night for when she +arrived she was stupid with liquor and unable to understand that the +ambulance had already gone to Flushing. When they convinced her of +this she immediately fainted as if that was the intolerable part of +the affair. Someone kind or curious took her in his car and drove +her in the wake of her sister's body. + +Until long after midnight a changing crowd lapped up against the front +of the garage while George Wilson rocked himself back and forth on the +couch inside. For a while the door of the office was open and +everyone who came into the garage glanced irresistibly through it. +Finally someone said it was a shame and closed the door. Michaelis and +several other men were with him--first four or five men, later two or +three men. Still later Michaelis had to ask the last stranger to wait +there fifteen minutes longer while he went back to his own place and made +a pot of coffee. After that he stayed there alone with Wilson until dawn. + +About three o'clock the quality of Wilson's incoherent muttering +changed--he grew quieter and began to talk about the yellow car. He +announced that he had a way of finding out whom the yellow car belonged +to, and then he blurted out that a couple of months ago his wife had +come from the city with her face bruised and her nose swollen. + +But when he heard himself say this, he flinched and began to cry "Oh, +my God!" again in his groaning voice. Michaelis made a clumsy attempt +to distract him. + +"How long have you been married, George? Come on there, try and sit +still a minute and answer my question. How long have you been married?" + +"Twelve years." + +"Ever had any children? Come on, George, sit still--I asked you a +question. Did you ever have any children?" + +The hard brown beetles kept thudding against the dull light and whenever +Michaelis heard a car go tearing along the road outside it sounded to him +like the car that hadn't stopped a few hours before. He didn't like to go +into the garage because the work bench was stained where the body had +been lying so he moved uncomfortably around the office--he knew every +object in it before morning--and from time to time sat down beside Wilson +trying to keep him more quiet. + +"Have you got a church you go to sometimes, George? Maybe even if you +haven't been there for a long time? Maybe I could call up the church +and get a priest to come over and he could talk to you, see?" + +"Don't belong to any." + +"You ought to have a church, George, for times like this. You must have +gone to church once. Didn't you get married in a church? Listen, George, +listen to me. Didn't you get married in a church?" + +"That was a long time ago." + +The effort of answering broke the rhythm of his rocking--for a moment he +was silent. Then the same half knowing, half bewildered look came back +into his faded eyes. + +"Look in the drawer there," he said, pointing at the desk. + +"Which drawer?" + +"That drawer--that one." + +Michaelis opened the drawer nearest his hand. There was nothing in it but +a small expensive dog leash made of leather and braided silver. It was +apparently new. + +"This?" he inquired, holding it up. + +Wilson stared and nodded. + +"I found it yesterday afternoon. She tried to tell me about it but I +knew it was something funny." + +"You mean your wife bought it?" + +"She had it wrapped in tissue paper on her bureau." + +Michaelis didn't see anything odd in that and he gave Wilson a dozen +reasons why his wife might have bought the dog leash. But conceivably +Wilson had heard some of these same explanations before, from Myrtle, +because he began saying "Oh, my God!" again in a whisper--his comforter +left several explanations in the air. + +"Then he killed her," said Wilson. His mouth dropped open suddenly. + +"Who did?" + +"I have a way of finding out." + +"You're morbid, George," said his friend. "This has been a strain to you +and you don't know what you're saying. You'd better try and sit quiet +till morning." + +"He murdered her." + +"It was an accident, George." + +Wilson shook his head. His eyes narrowed and his mouth widened slightly +with the ghost of a superior "Hm!" + +"I know," he said definitely, "I'm one of these trusting fellas and I +don't think any harm to NObody, but when I get to know a thing I know +it. It was the man in that car. She ran out to speak to him and he +wouldn't stop." + +Michaelis had seen this too but it hadn't occurred to him that there was +any special significance in it. He believed that Mrs. Wilson had been +running away from her husband, rather than trying to stop any +particular car. + +"How could she of been like that?" + +"She's a deep one," said Wilson, as if that answered the question. +"Ah-h-h----" + +He began to rock again and Michaelis stood twisting the leash in +his hand. + +"Maybe you got some friend that I could telephone for, George?" + +This was a forlorn hope--he was almost sure that Wilson had no friend: +there was not enough of him for his wife. He was glad a little later when +he noticed a change in the room, a blue quickening by the window, and +realized that dawn wasn't far off. About five o'clock it was blue enough +outside to snap off the light. + +Wilson's glazed eyes turned out to the ashheaps, where small grey +clouds took on fantastic shape and scurried here and there in the faint +dawn wind. + +"I spoke to her," he muttered, after a long silence. "I told her she might +fool me but she couldn't fool God. I took her to the window--" With an +effort he got up and walked to the rear window and leaned with his face +pressed against it, "--and I said 'God knows what you've been doing, +everything you've been doing. You may fool me but you can't fool God!' " + +Standing behind him Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the +eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg which had just emerged pale and enormous +from the dissolving night. + +"God sees everything," repeated Wilson. + +"That's an advertisement," Michaelis assured him. Something made him turn +away from the window and look back into the room. But Wilson stood there a +long time, his face close to the window pane, nodding into the twilight. + + +By six o'clock Michaelis was worn out and grateful for the sound of a +car stopping outside. It was one of the watchers of the night before +who had promised to come back so he cooked breakfast for three which +he and the other man ate together. Wilson was quieter now and Michaelis +went home to sleep; when he awoke four hours later and hurried back to the +garage Wilson was gone. + +His movements--he was on foot all the time--were afterward traced to Port +Roosevelt and then to Gad's Hill where he bought a sandwich that he +didn't eat and a cup of coffee. He must have been tired and walking +slowly for he didn't reach Gad's Hill until noon. Thus far there was +no difficulty in accounting for his time--there were boys who had seen a +man "acting sort of crazy" and motorists at whom he stared oddly from +the side of the road. Then for three hours he disappeared from view. +The police, on the strength of what he said to Michaelis, that he "had +a way of finding out," supposed that he spent that time going from +garage to garage thereabouts inquiring for a yellow car. On the other +hand no garage man who had seen him ever came forward--and perhaps he +had an easier, surer way of finding out what he wanted to know. By +half past two he was in West Egg where he asked someone the way to +Gatsby's house. So by that time he knew Gatsby's name. + + +At two o'clock Gatsby put on his bathing suit and left word with the +butler that if any one phoned word was to be brought to him at the +pool. He stopped at the garage for a pneumatic mattress that had amused +his guests during the summer, and the chauffeur helped him pump it up. +Then he gave instructions that the open car wasn't to be taken out +under any circumstances--and this was strange because the front right +fender needed repair. + +Gatsby shouldered the mattress and started for the pool. Once he +stopped and shifted it a little, and the chauffeur asked him if he +needed help, but he shook his head and in a moment disappeared among +the yellowing trees. + +No telephone message arrived but the butler went without his sleep and +waited for it until four o'clock--until long after there was any one to +give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't +believe it would come and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true +he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high +price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up +at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he +found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was +upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being +real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted +fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward +him through the amorphous trees. + +The chauffeur--he was one of Wolfshiem's protégés--heard the +shots--afterward he could only say that he hadn't thought anything much +about them. I drove from the station directly to Gatsby's house and my +rushing anxiously up the front steps was the first thing that alarmed any +one. But they knew then, I firmly believe. With scarcely a word said, four +of us, the chauffeur, butler, gardener and I, hurried down to the pool. + +There was a faint, barely perceptible movement of the water as the +fresh flow from one end urged its way toward the drain at the other. +With little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves, the laden +mattress moved irregularly down the pool. A small gust of wind that +scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental +course with its accidental burden. The touch of a cluster of leaves +revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of compass, a thin red circle +in the water. + +It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener +saw Wilson's body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was +complete. + + + + +Chapter 9 + + + +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 "mad man" 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 simplest 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 upstairs +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 +grey 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 mad man," 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 upstairs; 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 tomorrow," 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 tomorrow. 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 sid. 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 goodbye. 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 and 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 +goodbye. + +"Nevertheless you did throw me over," said Jordan suddenly. "You threw me +over on the telephone. I don't give a damn about you now but it was a +new experience for me and I felt a little dizzy for a while." + +We shook hands. + +"Oh, and do you remember--" she added, "----a conversation we had once +about driving a car?" + +"Why--not exactly." + +"You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? +Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I? I mean it was careless of me +to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, +straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride." + +"I'm thirty," I said. "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call +it 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 upstairs. He was crazy enough to kill me if I +hadn't told him who owned the car. His hand was on a revolver in his +pocket every minute he was in the house----" He 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--tomorrow +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. + + + +THE END -- 2.47.0