Chapter 6



About this time an ambitious young reporter from New York arrived one
morning at Gatsby's door and asked him if he had anything to say.

"Anything to say about what?" inquired Gatsby politely.

"Why,--any statement to give out."

It transpired after a confused five minutes that the man had heard
Gatsby's name around his office in a connection which he either
wouldn't reveal or didn't fully understand. This was his day off
and with laudable initiative he had hurried out "to see."

It was a random shot, and yet the reporter's instinct was right. Gatsby's
notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his
hospitality and so become authorities on his past, had increased
all summer until he fell just short of being news. Contemporary
legends such as the "underground pipe-line to Canada" attached
themselves to him, and there was one persistent story that he
didn't live in a house at all, but in a boat that looked like a house
and was moved secretly up and down the Long Island shore. Just why
these inventions were a source of satisfaction to James Gatz of North
Dakota, isn't easy to say.

James Gatz--that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had
changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that
witnessed the beginning of his career--when he saw Dan Cody's yacht drop
anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior. It was James Gatz
who had been loafing along the beach that afternoon in a torn green
jersey and a pair of canvas pants, but it was already Jay Gatsby who
borrowed a row-boat, pulled out to the TUOLOMEE and informed Cody that
a wind might catch him and break him up in half an hour.

I suppose he'd had the name ready for a long time, even then. His
parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people--his imagination had
never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that
Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic
conception of himself. He was a son of God--a phrase which, if it means
anything, means just that--and he must be about His Father's Business,
the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty. So he invented
just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be
likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.

For over a year he had been beating his way along the south shore of
Lake Superior as a clam digger and a salmon fisher or in any other
capacity that brought him food and bed. His brown, hardening body lived
naturally through the half fierce, half lazy work of the bracing days.
He knew women early and since they spoiled him he became contemptuous
of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of the others
because they were hysterical about things which in his overwhelming
self-absorption he took for granted.

But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque
and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe
of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the
clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet
light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the
pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid
scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an
outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the
unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded
securely on a fairy's wing.

An instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months before, to
the small Lutheran college of St. Olaf in southern Minnesota. He stayed
there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of
his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor's work with
which he was to pay his way through. Then he drifted back to Lake
Superior, and he was still searching for something to do on the day
that Dan Cody's yacht dropped anchor in the shallows along shore.

Cody was fifty years old then, a product of the Nevada silver fields,
of the Yukon, of every rush for metal since Seventy-five. The
transactions in Montana copper that made him many times a millionaire
found him physically robust but on the verge of soft-mindedness, and,
suspecting this an infinite number of women tried to separate him from
his money. The none too savory ramifications by which Ella Kaye, the
newspaper woman, played Madame de Maintenon to his weakness and sent him
to sea in a yacht, were common knowledge to the turgid journalism
of 1902. He had been coasting along all too hospitable shores for five
years when he turned up as James Gatz's destiny at Little Girl Bay.

To the young Gatz, resting on his oars and looking up at the railed
deck, the yacht represented all the beauty and glamor in the world. I
suppose he smiled at Cody--he had probably discovered that people liked
him when he smiled. At any rate Cody asked him a few questions (one of
them elicited the brand new name) and found that he was quick, and
extravagantly ambitious. A few days later he took him to Duluth and
bought him a blue coat, six pair of white duck trousers and a yachting
cap. And when the TUOLOMEE left for the West Indies and the Barbary
Coast Gatsby left too.

He was employed in a vague personal capacity--while he remained with
Cody he was in turn steward, mate, skipper, secretary, and even jailor,
for Dan Cody sober knew what lavish doings Dan Cody drunk might soon be
about and he provided for such contingencies by reposing more and more
trust in Gatsby. The arrangement lasted five years during which the
boat went three times around the continent. It might have lasted
indefinitely except for the fact that Ella Kaye came on board one night
in Boston and a week later Dan Cody inhospitably died.

I remember the portrait of him up in Gatsby's bedroom, a grey, florid
man with a hard empty face--the pioneer debauchee who during one phase
of American life brought back to the eastern seaboard the savage
violence of the frontier brothel and saloon. It was indirectly due to
Cody that Gatsby drank so little. Sometimes in the course of gay parties
women used to rub champagne into his hair; for himself he formed the
habit of letting liquor alone.

And it was from Cody that he inherited money--a legacy of twenty-five
thousand dollars. He didn't get it. He never understood the legal
device that was used against him but what remained of the millions
went intact to Ella Kaye. He was left with his singularly appropriate
education; the vague contour of Jay Gatsby had filled out to the
substantiality of a man.


He told me all this very much later, but I've put it down here with the
idea of exploding those first wild rumors about his antecedents, which
weren't even faintly true. Moreover he told it to me at a time of
confusion, when I had reached the point of believing everything and
nothing about him. So I take advantage of this short halt, while
Gatsby, so to speak, caught his breath, to clear this set of
misconceptions away.

It was a halt, too, in my association with his affairs. For
several weeks I didn't see him or hear his voice on the phone--mostly
I was in New York, trotting around with Jordan and trying to
ingratiate myself with her senile aunt--but finally I went over to
his house one Sunday afternoon. I hadn't been there two minutes when
somebody brought Tom Buchanan in for a drink. I was startled,
naturally, but the really surprising thing was that it hadn't happened
before.

They were a party of three on horseback--Tom and a man named Sloane and
a pretty woman in a brown riding habit who had been there previously.

"I'm delighted to see you," said Gatsby standing on his porch.
"I'm delighted that you dropped in."

As though they cared!

"Sit right down. Have a cigarette or a cigar." He walked around the room
quickly, ringing bells. "I'll have something to drink for you in just
a minute."

He was profoundly affected by the fact that Tom was there. But he would be
uneasy anyhow until he had given them something, realizing in a vague
way that that was all they came for. Mr. Sloane wanted nothing. A
lemonade? No, thanks. A little champagne? Nothing at all,
thanks. . . . I'm sorry----

"Did you have a nice ride?"

"Very good roads around here."

"I suppose the automobiles----"

"Yeah."

Moved by an irresistible impulse, Gatsby turned to Tom who had accepted
the introduction as a stranger.

"I believe we've met somewhere before, Mr. Buchanan."

"Oh, yes," said Tom, gruffly polite but obviously not remembering.
"So we did. I remember very well."

"About two weeks ago."

"That's right. You were with Nick here."

"I know your wife," continued Gatsby, almost aggressively.

"That so?"

Tom turned to me.

"You live near here, Nick?"

"Next door."

"That so?"

Mr. Sloane didn't enter into the conversation but lounged back haughtily
in his chair; the woman said nothing either--until unexpectedly, after
two highballs, she became cordial.

"We'll all come over to your next party, Mr. Gatsby," she suggested.
"What do you say?"

"Certainly. I'd be delighted to have you."

"Be ver' nice," said Mr. Sloane, without gratitude. "Well--think ought to
be starting home."

"Please don't hurry," Gatsby urged them. He had control of himself now
and he wanted to see more of Tom. "Why don't you--why don't you stay for
supper? I wouldn't be surprised if some other people dropped in from
New York."

"You come to supper with ME," said the lady enthusiastically.
"Both of you."

This included me. Mr. Sloane got to his feet.

"Come along," he said--but to her only.

"I mean it," she insisted. "I'd love to have you. Lots of room."

Gatsby looked at me questioningly. He wanted to go and he didn't see
that Mr. Sloane had determined he shouldn't.

"I'm afraid I won't be able to," I said.

"Well, you come," she urged, concentrating on Gatsby.

Mr. Sloane murmured something close to her ear.

"We won't be late if we start now," she insisted aloud.

"I haven't got a horse," said Gatsby. "I used to ride in the army but
I've never bought a horse. I'll have to follow you in my car. Excuse me
for just a minute."

The rest of us walked out on the porch, where Sloane and the lady began
an impassioned conversation aside.

"My God, I believe the man's coming," said Tom. "Doesn't he know she
doesn't want him?"

"She says she does want him."

"She has a big dinner party and he won't know a soul there." He frowned.
"I wonder where in the devil he met Daisy. By God, I may be
old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to
suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish."

Suddenly Mr. Sloane and the lady walked down the steps and mounted
their horses.

"Come on," said Mr. Sloane to Tom, "we're late. We've got to go." And then
to me: "Tell him we couldn't wait, will you?"

Tom and I shook hands, the rest of us exchanged a cool nod and
they trotted quickly down the drive, disappearing under the August
foliage just as Gatsby with hat and light overcoat in hand came out
the front door.

Tom was evidently perturbed at Daisy's running around alone, for on the
following Saturday night he came with her to Gatsby's party. Perhaps
his presence gave the evening its peculiar quality of oppressiveness--it
stands out in my memory from Gatsby's other parties that summer. There
were the same people, or at least the same sort of people, the same
profusion of champagne, the same many-colored, many-keyed commotion,
but I felt an unpleasantness in the air, a pervading harshness that
hadn't been there before. Or perhaps I had merely grown used to it,
grown to accept West Egg as a world complete in itself, with its own
standards and its own great figures, second to nothing because it had
no consciousness of being so, and now I was looking at it again,
through Daisy's eyes. It is invariably saddening to look through new
eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of
adjustment.

They arrived at twilight and as we strolled out among the sparkling
hundreds Daisy's voice was playing murmurous tricks in her throat.

"These things excite me SO," she whispered. "If you want to kiss me
any time during the evening, Nick, just let me know and I'll be glad
to arrange it for you. Just mention my name. Or present a green card.
I'm giving out green----"

"Look around," suggested Gatsby.

"I'm looking around. I'm having a marvelous----"

"You must see the faces of many people you've heard about."

Tom's arrogant eyes roamed the crowd.

"We don't go around very much," he said. "In fact I was just thinking
I don't know a soul here."

"Perhaps you know that lady." Gatsby indicated a gorgeous, scarcely human
orchid of a woman who sat in state under a white plum tree. Tom and Daisy
stared, with that peculiarly unreal feeling that accompanies the
recognition of a hitherto ghostly celebrity of the movies.

"She's lovely," said Daisy.

"The man bending over her is her director."

He took them ceremoniously from group to group:

"Mrs. Buchanan . . . and Mr. Buchanan----" After an instant's hesitation
he added: "the polo player."

"Oh no," objected Tom quickly, "Not me."

But evidently the sound of it pleased Gatsby for Tom remained "the polo
player" for the rest of the evening.

"I've never met so many celebrities!" Daisy exclaimed. "I liked that
man--what was his name?--with the sort of blue nose."

Gatsby identified him, adding that he was a small producer.

"Well, I liked him anyhow."

"I'd a little rather not be the polo player," said Tom pleasantly, "I'd
rather look at all these famous people in--in oblivion."

Daisy and Gatsby danced. I remember being surprised by his graceful,
conservative fox-trot--I had never seen him dance before. Then they
sauntered over to my house and sat on the steps for half an hour while
at her request I remained watchfully in the garden: "In case there's a
fire or a flood," she explained, "or any act of God."

Tom appeared from his oblivion as we were sitting down to supper together.
"Do you mind if I eat with some people over here?" he said. "A fellow's
getting off some funny stuff."

"Go ahead," answered Daisy genially, "And if you want to take down any
addresses here's my little gold pencil. . . ." She looked around after
a moment and told me the girl was "common but pretty," and I knew that
except for the half hour she'd been alone with Gatsby she wasn't having
a good time.

We were at a particularly tipsy table. That was my fault--Gatsby had
been called to the phone and I'd enjoyed these same people only two
weeks before. But what had amused me then turned septic on the air now.

"How do you feel, Miss Baedeker?"

The girl addressed was trying, unsuccessfully, to slump against my
shoulder. At this inquiry she sat up and opened her eyes.

"Wha?"

A massive and lethargic woman, who had been urging Daisy to play golf
with her at the local club tomorrow, spoke in Miss Baedeker's defence:

"Oh, she's all right now. When she's had five or six cocktails she always
starts screaming like that. I tell her she ought to leave it alone."

"I do leave it alone," affirmed the accused hollowly.

"We heard you yelling, so I said to Doc Civet here: 'There's somebody
that needs your help, Doc.' "

"She's much obliged, I'm sure," said another friend, without gratitude.
"But you got her dress all wet when you stuck her head in the pool."

"Anything I hate is to get my head stuck in a pool," mumbled Miss
Baedeker. "They almost drowned me once over in New Jersey."

"Then you ought to leave it alone," countered Doctor Civet.

"Speak for yourself!" cried Miss Baedeker violently. "Your hand shakes.
I wouldn't let you operate on me!"

It was like that. Almost the last thing I remember was standing with
Daisy and watching the moving picture director and his Star. They were
still under the white plum tree and their faces were touching except
for a pale thin ray of moonlight between. It occurred to me that he
had been very slowly bending toward her all evening to attain this
proximity, and even while I watched I saw him stoop one ultimate degree
and kiss at her cheek.

"I like her," said Daisy, "I think she's lovely."

But the rest offended her--and inarguably, because it wasn't a gesture but
an emotion. She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented "place"
that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village--appalled
by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too
obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing
to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed
to understand.

I sat on the front steps with them while they waited for their car. It
was dark here in front: only the bright door sent ten square feet of
light volleying out into the soft black morning. Sometimes a shadow
moved against a dressing-room blind above, gave way to another shadow,
an indefinite procession of shadows, who rouged and powdered in an
invisible glass.

"Who is this Gatsby anyhow?" demanded Tom suddenly. "Some big bootlegger?"

"Where'd you hear that?" I inquired.

"I didn't hear it. I imagined it. A lot of these newly rich people are
just big bootleggers, you know."

"Not Gatsby," I said shortly.

He was silent for a moment. The pebbles of the drive crunched under his
feet.

"Well, he certainly must have strained himself to get this menagerie
together."

A breeze stirred the grey haze of Daisy's fur collar.

"At least they're more interesting than the people we know," she said
with an effort.

"You didn't look so interested."

"Well, I was."

Tom laughed and turned to me.

"Did you notice Daisy's face when that girl asked her to put her under
a cold shower?"

Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper,
bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had
before and would never have again. When the melody rose, her voice
broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and
each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.

"Lots of people come who haven't been invited," she said suddenly.
"That girl hadn't been invited. They simply force their way in and he's
too polite to object."

"I'd like to know who he is and what he does," insisted Tom. "And I think
I'll make a point of finding out."

"I can tell you right now," she answered. "He owned some drug stores,
a lot of drug stores. He built them up himself."

The dilatory limousine came rolling up the drive.

"Good night, Nick," said Daisy.

Her glance left me and sought the lighted top of the steps where
"Three o'Clock in the Morning," a neat, sad little waltz of that year,
was drifting out the open door. After all, in the very casualness of
Gatsby's party there were romantic possibilities totally absent from
her world. What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling
her back inside? What would happen now in the dim incalculable hours?
Perhaps some unbelievable guest would arrive, a person infinitely rare
and to be marvelled at, some authentically radiant young girl who with
one fresh glance at Gatsby, one moment of magical encounter, would blot
out those five years of unwavering devotion.


I stayed late that night. Gatsby asked me to wait until he was free
and I lingered in the garden until the inevitable swimming party had run
up, chilled and exalted, from the black beach, until the lights were
extinguished in the guest rooms overhead. When he came down the 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 three 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 favors 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 sidewalk 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 and 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.

Chapter 5



When I came home to West Egg that night I was afraid for a moment that
my house was on fire. Two o'clock and the whole corner of the peninsula
was blazing with light which fell unreal on the shrubbery and made thin
elongating glints upon the roadside wires. Turning a corner I saw that it
was Gatsby's house, lit from tower to cellar.

At first I thought it was another party, a wild rout that had resolved
itself into "hide-and-go-seek" or "sardines-in-the-box" with all the
house thrown open to the game. But there wasn't a sound. Only wind in
the trees which blew the wires and made the lights go off and on again
as if the house had winked into the darkness. As my taxi groaned away I
saw Gatsby walking toward me across his lawn.

"Your place looks like the world's fair," I said.

"Does it?" He turned his eyes toward it absently. "I have been glancing
into some of the rooms. Let's go to Coney Island, old sport. In my car."

"It's too late."

"Well, suppose we take a plunge in the swimming pool? I haven't made use
of it all summer."

"I've got to go to bed."

"All right."

He waited, looking at me with suppressed eagerness.

"I talked with Miss Baker," I said after a moment. "I'm going to call up
Daisy tomorrow and invite her over here to tea."

"Oh, that's all right," he said carelessly. "I don't want to put you to
any trouble."

"What day would suit you?"

"What day would suit YOU?" he corrected me quickly. "I don't want to put
you to any trouble, you see."

"How about the day after tomorrow?" He considered for a moment. Then,
with reluctance:

"I want to get the grass cut," he said.

We both looked at the grass--there was a sharp line where my ragged lawn
ended and the darker, well-kept expanse of his began. I suspected that
he meant my grass.

"There's another little thing," he said uncertainly, and hesitated.

"Would you rather put it off for a few days?" I asked.

"Oh, it isn't about that. At least----" He fumbled with a series of
beginnings. "Why, I thought--why, look here, old sport, you don't make
much money, do you?"

"Not very much."

This seemed to reassure him and he continued more confidently.

"I thought you didn't, if you'll pardon my--you see, I carry on a
little business on the side, a sort of sideline, you understand. And I
thought that if you don't make very much--You're selling bonds, aren't
you, old sport?"

"Trying to."

"Well, this would interest you. It wouldn't take up much of your
time and you might pick up a nice bit of money. It happens to be
a rather confidential sort of thing."

I realize now that under different circumstances that conversation might
have been one of the crises of my life. But, because the offer was
obviously and tactlessly for a service to be rendered, I had no choice
except to cut him off there.

"I've got my hands full," I said. "I'm much obliged but I couldn't take
on any more work."

"You wouldn't have to do any business with Wolfshiem." Evidently he
thought that I was shying away from the "gonnegtion" mentioned at lunch,
but I assured him he was wrong. He waited a moment longer, hoping I'd
begin a conversation, but I was too absorbed to be responsive, so he went
unwillingly home.

The evening had made me light-headed and happy; I think I walked into a
deep sleep as I entered my front door. So I didn't know whether or not
Gatsby went to Coney Island or for how many hours he "glanced into
rooms" while his house blazed gaudily on. I called up Daisy from the
office next morning and invited her to come to tea.

"Don't bring Tom," I warned her.

"What?"

"Don't bring Tom."

"Who is 'Tom'?" she asked innocently.

The day agreed upon was pouring rain. At eleven o'clock a man in a
raincoat dragging a lawn-mower tapped at my front door and said that
Mr. Gatsby had sent him over to cut my grass. This reminded me that I
had forgotten to tell my Finn to come back so I drove into West Egg
Village to search for her among soggy white-washed alleys and to buy
some cups and lemons and flowers.

The flowers were unnecessary, for at two o'clock a greenhouse arrived
from Gatsby's, with innumerable receptacles to contain it. An hour
later the front door opened nervously, and Gatsby in a white flannel
suit, silver shirt and gold-colored tie hurried in. He was pale and
there were dark signs of sleeplessness beneath his eyes.

"Is everything all right?" he asked immediately.

"The grass looks fine, if that's what you mean."

"What grass?" he inquired blankly. "Oh, the grass in the yard." He looked
out the window at it, but judging from his expression I don't believe
he saw a thing.

"Looks very good," he remarked vaguely. "One of the papers said they
thought the rain would stop about four. I think it was 'The Journal.' Have
you got everything you need in the shape of--of tea?"

I took him into the pantry where he looked a little reproachfully at the
Finn. Together we scrutinized the twelve lemon cakes from the delicatessen
shop.

"Will they do?" I asked.

"Of course, of course! They're fine!" and he added hollowly, ". . .old
sport."

The rain cooled about half-past three to a damp mist through which
occasional thin drops swam like dew. Gatsby looked with vacant eyes
through a copy of Clay's "Economics," starting at the Finnish tread that
shook the kitchen floor and peering toward the bleared windows from time
to time as if a series of invisible but alarming happenings were taking
place outside. Finally he got up and informed me in an uncertain voice
that he was going home.

"Why's that?"

"Nobody's coming to tea. It's too late!" He looked at his watch as if
there was some pressing demand on his time elsewhere. "I can't wait
all day."

"Don't be silly; it's just two minutes to four."

He sat down, miserably, as if I had pushed him, and simultaneously there
was the sound of a motor turning into my lane. We both jumped up and,
a little harrowed myself, I went out into the yard.

Under the dripping bare lilac trees a large open car was coming up the
drive. It stopped. Daisy's face, tipped sideways beneath a
three-cornered lavender hat, looked out at me with a bright ecstatic
smile.

"Is this absolutely where you live, my dearest one?"

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I had
to follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone
before any words came through. A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of
blue paint across her cheek and her hand was wet with glistening drops as
I took it to help her from the car.

"Are you in love with me," she said low in my ear. "Or why did I have
to come alone?"

"That's the secret of Castle Rackrent. Tell your chauffeur to go far
away and spend an hour."

"Come back in an hour, Ferdie." Then in a grave murmur, "His name is
Ferdie."

"Does the gasoline affect his nose?"

"I don't think so," she said innocently. "Why?"

We went in. To my overwhelming surprise the living room was deserted.

"Well, that's funny!" I exclaimed.

"What's funny?"

She turned her head as there was a light, dignified knocking at the front
door. I went out and opened it. Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands
plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of
water glaring tragically into my eyes.

With his hands still in his coat pockets he stalked by me into the
hall, turned sharply as if he were on a wire and disappeared into the
living room. It wasn't a bit funny. Aware of the loud beating of my own
heart I pulled the door to against the increasing rain.

For half a minute there wasn't a sound. Then from the living room I
heard a sort of choking murmur and part of a laugh followed by Daisy's
voice on a clear artificial note.

"I certainly am awfully glad to see you again."

A pause; it endured horribly. I had nothing to do in the hall so I went
into the room.

Gatsby, his hands still in his pockets, was reclining against the
mantelpiece in a strained counterfeit of perfect ease, even of boredom.
His head leaned back so far that it rested against the face 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 neighboring 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 occasionally willing 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 a
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 the 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 short cut along the Sound we went down 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 odor of jonquils and the frothy odor of hawthorn
and plum blossoms and the pale gold odor 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 pajamas 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 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 overwound 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-colored 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."

They stood side by side examining it. I was going to ask to see the rubies
when the phone rang and Gatsby took up the receiver.

"Yes. . . . Well, I can't talk now. . . . I can't talk now, old
sport. . . . I said a SMALL town. . . . He must know what a small town
is. . . . Well, he's no use to us if Detroit is his idea of a small
town. . . ."

He rang off.

"Come here QUICK!" cried Daisy at the window.

The rain was still falling, but the darkness had parted in the west,
and there was a pink and golden billow of foamy clouds above the sea.

"Look at that," she whispered, and then after a moment: "I'd like to
just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you
around."

I tried to go then, but they wouldn't hear of it; perhaps my presence
made them feel more satisfactorily alone.

"I know what we'll do," said Gatsby, "we'll have Klipspringer play the
piano."

He went out of the room calling "Ewing!" and returned in a few
minutes accompanied by an embarrassed, slightly worn young man with
shell-rimmed glasses and scanty blonde hair. He was now decently clothed
in a "sport shirt" open at the neck, sneakers and duck trousers of a
nebulous hue.

"Did we interrupt your exercises?" inquired Daisy politely.

"I was asleep," cried Mr. Klipspringer, in a spasm of embarrassment.
"That is, I'd BEEN asleep. Then I got up. . . ."

"Klipspringer plays the piano," said Gatsby, cutting him off. "Don't you,
Ewing, old sport?"

"I don't play well. I don't--I hardly play at all. I'm all out of
prac----"

"We'll go downstairs," interrupted Gatsby. He flipped a switch. The
grey windows disappeared as the house glowed full of light.

In the music room Gatsby turned on a solitary lamp beside the piano. He
lit Daisy's cigarette from a trembling match, and sat down with her on
a couch far across the room where there was no light save what the
gleaming floor bounced in from the hall.

When Klipspringer had played "The Love Nest" he turned around on the
bench and searched unhappily for Gatsby in the gloom.

"I'm all out of practice, you see. I told you I couldn't play. I'm all
out of prac----"

"Don't talk so much, old sport," commanded Gatsby. "Play!"


    IN THE MORNING,
    IN THE EVENING,
       AIN'T WE GOT FUN----

Outside the wind was loud and there was a faint flow of thunder along the
Sound. All the lights were going on in West Egg now; the electric trains,
men-carrying, were plunging home through the rain from New York. It was
the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on
the air.


    ONE THING'S SURE AND NOTHING'S SURER
    THE RICH GET RICHER AND THE POOR GET--CHILDREN.
       IN THE MEANTIME,
       IN BETWEEN TIME----


As I went over to say goodbye I saw that the expression of bewilderment
had come back into Gatsby's face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to
him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five
years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when
Daisy tumbled short of his dreams--not through her own fault but
because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond
her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative
passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright
feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can
challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

As I watched him he adjusted himself a little, visibly. His hand took
hold of hers and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward
her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most with its
fluctuating, feverish warmth because it couldn't be over-dreamed--that
voice was a deathless song.

They had forgotten me, but Daisy glanced up and held out her hand;
Gatsby didn't know me now at all. I looked once more at them and they
looked back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life. Then I went out
of the room and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them there
together.