The Great Gatsby
steps at last the tanned skin was drawn unusually tight on his face,
and his eyes were bright and tired.
“She didn’t like it,” he said immediately.
“Of course she did.”
“She didn’t like it,” he insisted. “She didn’t have a good time.”
He was silent, and I guessed at his unutterable depression.
“I feel far away from her,” he said. “It’s hard to make her
understand.”
“You mean about the dance?”
“The dance?” He dismissed all the dances he had given with a snap of
his fingers. “Old sport, the dance is unimportant.”
He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and
say: “I never loved you.” After she had obliterated four years with
that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be
taken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back
to Louisville and be married from her house—just as if it were five
years ago.
“And she doesn’t understand,” he said. “She used to be able to
understand. We’d sit for hours—”
He broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit
rinds and discarded favours and crushed flowers.
“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the
past.”
“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you
can!”
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the
shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.
“I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he said,
nodding determinedly. “She’ll see.”
He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to
recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into
loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then,
but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it
all slowly, he could find out what that thing was …
… One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the
street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where
there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They
stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night
with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes
of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the
darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the
corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really
formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could
climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the
pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.
His heart beat faster 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.
VII
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
pocketbook 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 everyone 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 anyone should care in this heat whose flushed lips he kissed,
whose head made damp the pyjama 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 centre 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 rumour 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 rose-beds and the hot lawn and the weedy
refuse of the dog-days alongshore. 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 gaiety with the cold ale.
“What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon?” cried Daisy, “and the
day after that, and the next thirty years?”