The Great Gatsby
“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,” someone 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 a 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 33rd 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 lined
five deep with throbbing taxicabs, 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 made unintelligible circles inside. Imagining
that I, too, was hurrying towards gaiety 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 everyone 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 semifinal 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 moustache of
perspiration appeared on her upper lip. Nevertheless there was a vague
understanding that had to be tactfully broken off before I was free.
Everyone 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.
IV
On Sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages alongshore,
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 timetable the names of
those who came to Gatsby’s house that summer. It is an old timetable
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. Schwartz (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 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 Myer 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