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my car. Excuse me for just a minute.’
周e 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 Dai-
sy. By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women
run around too much these days to suit me. 周ey 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. 周ere
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.
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Or perhaps I had merely grown used to it, grown to accept
West Egg as a world complete in itself, with its own stan-
dards 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 ex-
pended your own powers of adjustment.
周ey arrived at twilight and as we strolled out among the
sparkling hundreds Daisy’s voice was playing murmurous
tricks in her throat.
‘周ese 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 gor-
geous, 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.
‘周e man bending over her is her director.’
He took them ceremoniously from group to group:
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‘Mrs. Buchanan … and Mr. Buchanan——’ A晴er an in-
stant’s hesitation he added: ‘the polo player.’
‘Oh no,’ objected Tom quickly, ‘Not me.’
But evidently the sound of it pleased Gatsby for Tom re-
mained ‘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 pro-
ducer.
‘Well, I liked him anyhow.’
‘I’d a little rather not be the polo player,’ said Tom pleas-
antly, ‘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. 周en 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 a晴er 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.
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We were at a particularly tipsy table. 周at 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?’
周e 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 cock-
tails 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: ‘周ere’s
somebody that needs your help, Doc.’ ‘
‘She’s much obliged, I’m sure,’ said another friend, with-
out 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,’ mum-
bled Miss Baedeker. ‘周ey almost drowned me once over in
New Jersey.’
‘周en you ought to leave it alone,’ countered Doctor Civ-
et.
‘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
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standing with Daisy and watching the moving picture di-
rector and his Star. 周ey 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 begot-
ten 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 so晴 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 in-
visible 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.
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11
He was silent for a moment. 周e 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, rhyth-
mic 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. ‘周at girl hadn’t been invited. 周ey 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.’
周e dilatory limousine came rolling up the drive.
‘Good night, Nick,’ said Daisy.
Her glance le晴 me and sought the lighted top of the steps
where ‘周ree o’Clock in the Morning,’ a neat, sad little waltz
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of that year, was dri晴ing out the open door. A晴er all, in the
very casualness of Gatsby’s party there were romantic pos-
sibilities 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 infinite-
ly rare and to be marvelled at, some authentically radiant
young girl who with one fresh glance at Gatsby, one mo-
ment 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 depres-
sion.
‘I feel far away from her,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to make her
understand.’
‘You mean about the dance?’
‘周e dance?’ He dismissed all the dances he had given
with a snap of his fingers. ‘Old sport, the dance is unim-
portant.’
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11
He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go
to Tom and say: ‘I never loved you.’ A晴er she had obliter-
ated three years with that sentence they could decide upon
the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was
that, a晴er 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 flow-
ers.
‘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 lurk-
ing 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
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they came to a place where there were no trees and the side-
walk was white with moonlight. 周ey 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. 周e 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. 周en he kissed her. At his
lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the in-
carnation was complete.
周rough all he said, even through his appalling sen-
timentality, I was reminded of something—an elusive
rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard some-
where 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.
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Chapter 7
I
t 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 Tri-
malchio 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 vil-
lainous face squinted at me suspiciously from the door.
‘Is Mr. Gatsby sick?’
‘Nope.’ A晴er a pause he added ‘sir’ in a dilatory, grudg-
ing 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 sup-
plies over the telephone. 周e grocery boy reported that the
kitchen looked like a pigsty, and the general opinion in the
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