The Great Gatsby
“The God damned coward!” he whimpered. “He didn’t even stop his car.”
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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 ground
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.
VIII
I couldn’t sleep all night; a foghorn 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 motorcars 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 pretences. 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 strata 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.
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“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?”