The Great Gatsby
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 neighbouring 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 willing, even eager, 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 the 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 an 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 shortcut along the Sound we went down to 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 odour of jonquils and the frothy
odour of hawthorn and plum blossoms and the pale gold odour 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 pyjamas 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’s 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 over-wound 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-coloured 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.”