The Great Gatsby

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  That was nineteen-seventeen. By the next year I had a few beaux myself, and I began to play in tournaments, so I didn't see Daisy very often. She went with a slightly older crowd - when she went with anyone at all. Wild rumours were circulating about her - how her mother had found her packing her bag one winter night to go to New York and say good-bye to a soldier who was going overseas. She was effectually prevented, but she wasn't on speaking terms with her family for several weeks. After that she didn't play around with the soldiers any more, but only with a few flat-footed, short-sighted young men in town, who couldn't get into the army at all.

  By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever. She had a debut after the armistice, and in February she was presumably engaged to a man from New Orleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago, with more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before. He came down with a hundred people in four private cars, and hired a whole floor of the Muhlbach Hotel, and the day before the wedding he gave her a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

  I was a bridesmaid. I came into her room half an hour before the bridal dinner, and found her lying on her bed as lovely as the June night in her flowered dress - and as drunk as a monkey. She had a bottle of Sauterne in one hand and a letter in the other.

  ''Gratulate me,' she muttered. 'Never had a drink before, but oh how I do enjoy it.'

  'What's the matter, Daisy?'

  I was scared, I can tell you; I'd never seen a girl like that before.

  'Here, deares'.' She groped around in a waste-basket she had with her on the bed and pulled out the string of pearls. 'Take 'em downstairs and give 'em back to whoever they belong to. Tell 'em all Daisy's change' her mine. Say: "Daisy's change' her mine!" '

  She began to cry - she cried and cried. I rushed out and found her mother's maid, and we locked the door and got her into a cold bath. She wouldn't let go of the letter. She took it into the tub with her and squeezed it up in a wet ball, and only let me leave it in the soap-dish when she saw that it was coming to pieces like snow.

  But she didn't say another word. We gave her spirits of ammonia and put ice on her forehead and hooked her back into her dress, and half an hour later, when we walked out of the room, the pearls were around her neck and the incident was over. Next day at five o'clock she married Tom Buchanan without so much as a shiver, and started off on a three months' trip to the South Seas.

  I saw them in Santa Barbara when they came back, and I thought I'd never seen a girl so mad about her husband. If he left the room for a minute she'd look around uneasily, and say: 'Where's Tom gone?' and wear the most abstracted expression until she saw him coming in the door. She used to sit on the sand with his head in her lap by the hour, rubbing her fingers over his eyes and looking at him with unfathomable delight. It was touching to see them together - it made you laugh in a hushed, fascinated way. That was in August. A week after I left Santa Barbara Tom ran into a wagon on the Ventura road one night, and ripped a front wheel off his car. The girl who was with him got into the papers, too, because her arm was broken - she was one of the chambermaids in the Santa Barbara Hotel.

  The next April Daisy had her little girl, and they went to France for a year. I saw them one spring in Cannes, and later in Deauville, and then they came back to Chicago to settle down. Daisy was popular in Chicago, as you know. They moved with a fast crowd, all of them young and rich and wild, but she came out with an absolutely perfect reputation. Perhaps because she doesn't drink. It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don't see or care. Perhaps Daisy never went in for amour at all - and yet there's something in that voice of hers...

  Well, about six weeks ago, she heard the name Gatsby for the first time in years. It was when I asked you - do you remember? - if you knew Gatsby in West Egg. After you had gone home she came into my room and woke me up, and said:

  'What Gatsby?' and when I described him - I was half asleep - she said in the strangest voice that it must be the man she used to know. It wasn't until then that I connected this Gatsby with the officer in her white car.

  When Jordan Baker had finished telling all this we had left the Plaza for half an hour and were driving in a victoria through Central Park. The sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in the West Fifties, and the clear voices of children, already gathered like crickets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight:

  'I' m the Sheik of Araby.

  Your love belongs to me.

  At night when you're asleep

  Into your tent I'll creep-'

  'It was a strange coincidence,' I said.

  'But it wasn't a coincidence at all.'

  'Why not?'

  'Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay.'

  Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour.

  'He wants to know,' continued Jordan, 'if you'll invite Daisy to your house some afternoon and then let him come over.'

  The modesty of the demand shook me. He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths - so that he could 'come over' some afternoon to a stranger's garden.

  'Did I have to know all this before he could ask such a little thing?'

  'He's afraid, he's waited so long. He thought you might be offended. You see, he's regular tough underneath it all.'

  Something worried me.

  'Why didn't he ask you to arrange a meeting?'

  'He wants her to see his house,' she explained. 'And your house is right next door.'

  'Oh!'

  'I think he half expected her to wander into one of his parties, some night,' went on Jordan, 'but she never did. Then he began asking people casually if they knew her, and I was the first one he found. It was that night he sent for me at his dance, and you should have heard the elaborate way he worked up to it. Of course, I immediately suggested a luncheon in New York - and I thought he'd go mad:

  ' "I don't want to do anything out of the way!" he kept saying. "I want to see her right next door."

  'When I said you were a particular friend of Tom's, he started to abandon the whole idea. He doesn't know very much about Tom, though he says he's read a Chicago paper for years just on the chance of catching a glimpse of Daisy's name.'

  It was dark now, and as we dipped under a little bridge I put my arm around Jordan's golden shoulder and drew her toward me and asked her to dinner. Suddenly I wasn't thinking of Daisy and Gatsby any more, but of this clean, hard, limited person, who dealt in universal scepticism, and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: 'There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.'

  'And Daisy ought to have something in her life,' murmured Jordan to me.

  'Does she want to see Gatsby?'

  'She's not to know about it. Gatsby doesn't want her to know. You're just supposed to invite her to tea.'

  We passed a barrier of dark trees, and then the facade of Fifty-ninth Street, a block of delicate pale light, beamed down into the park. Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs, and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan, scornful mouth smiled, and so I drew her up again closer, this time to my face.

  Chapter V

  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 i
nto '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.28 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 down 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 side line, 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 don'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 whitewashed 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-coloured 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.29 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,30 starting at the Finnish tread that shook the kitchen floor, and peering towards 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.31 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 hi
s 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.'