The Great Gatsby
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 drugstore 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
whisky 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 clamour 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
briefcase 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
ash-heaps 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 neighbour 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 neighbours 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 anyone spoke to him he invariably
laughed in an agreeable, colourless 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. Mavro Michaelis wasn’t even sure of
its colour—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 a little 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 metal
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
deranged 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 worktable 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:
“Oh, my Ga-od! Oh, 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 halfway 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
grasping 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 colour’s your car?”
“It’s a blue car, a coupé.”
“We’ve come straight from New York,” I said.
Someone 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.