intricate machines that register
earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This
responsiveness had nothing to do with that
flabby impressionability which is dignified
under the name of the “creative
temperament.”—it was an extraordinary gift
for hope, a romantic readiness such as I
have never found in any other person and
which it is not likely I shall ever find again.
No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is
what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust
floated in the wake of his dreams that
temporarily closed out my interest in the
abortive sorrows and short-winded elations
of men.

My family have been prominent, well-to-do
people in this Middle Western city for three
generations. The Carraways are something
of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re
descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch,
but the actual founder of my line was my
grandfather’s brother, who came here in
fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War,
and started the wholesale hardware
business that my father carries on to-day.

I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m
supposed to look like him—with special
reference to the rather hard-boiled painting
that hangs in father’s office I graduated
from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a
century after my father, and a little later I
participated in that delayed Teutonic
migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed
the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came
back restless. Instead of being the warm
centre of the world, the Middle West now
seemed like the ragged edge of the
universe—so I decided to go East and learn
the bond business. Everybody I knew was in
the bond business, so I supposed it could
support one more single man. All my aunts
and uncles talked it over as if they were
choosing a prep school for me, and finally
said, “Why—ye—es,” with very grave, hesitant

the mint, promising to unfold the shining
secrets that only Midas and Morgan and
Maecenas knew. And I had the high
intention of reading many other books
besides. I was rather literary in college—one
year I wrote a series of very solemn and
obvious editorials for the “Yale News.”—and
now I was going to bring back all such things
into my life and become again that most
limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded
man.” This isn’t just an epigram—life is much
more successfully looked at from a single
window, after all.

It was a matter of chance that I should have
rented a house in one of the strangest
communities in North America. It was on
that slender riotous island which extends
itself due east of New York—and where there
are, among other natural curiosities, two
unusual formations of land. Twenty miles
from the city a pair of enormous eggs,
identical in contour and separated only by a
courtesy bay, jut out into the most
domesticated body of salt water in the
Western hemisphere, the great wet
barnyard of Long Island Sound. they are not
perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus
story, they are both crushed flat at the
contact end—but their physical resemblance
must be a source of perpetual confusion to
the gulls that fly overhead. to the wingless a
more arresting phenomenon is their
dissimilarity in every particular except
shape and size.

I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less
fashionable of the two, though this is a most
superficial tag to express the bizarre and
not a little sinister contrast between them.
my house was at the very tip of the egg, only
fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed
between two huge places that rented for
twelve or fifteen thousand a season. the one
on my right was a colossal affair by any
standard—it was a factual imitation of some

didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s
heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on
forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the
dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable
football game.

And so it happened that on a warm windy
evening I drove over to East Egg to see two
old friends whom I scarcely knew at all.
Their house was even more elaborate than I
expected, a cheerful red-and-white
Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking
the bay. The lawn started at the beach and
ran toward the front door for a quarter of a
mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick
walks and burning gardens—finally when it
reached the house drifting up the side in
bright vines as though from the momentum
of its run. The front was broken by a line of
French windows, glowing now with
reflected gold and wide open to the warm
windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in
riding clothes was standing with his legs
apart on the front porch.

He had changed since his New Haven
years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired
man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a
supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant
eyes had established dominance over his
face and gave him the appearance of
always leaning aggressively forward. Not
even the effeminate swank of his riding
clothes could hide the enormous power of
that body—he seemed to fill those glistening
boots until he strained the top lacing, and
you could see a great pack of muscle
shifting when his shoulder moved under his
thin coat. It was a body capable of
enormous leverage—a cruel body.

His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor,
added to the impression of fractiousness
he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal
contempt in it, even toward people he
liked—and there were men at New Haven

upon an anchored balloon. They were both
in white, and their dresses were rippling
and fluttering as if they had just been blown
back in after a short flight around the house.
I must have stood for a few moments
listening to the whip and snap of the curtains
and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then
there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut
the rear windows and the caught wind died
out about the room, and the curtains and the
rugs and the two young women ballooned
slowly to the floor.

The younger of the two was a stranger to
me. She was extended full length at her end
of the divan, completely motionless, and
with her chin raised a little, as if she were
balancing something on it which was quite
likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner
of her eyes she gave no hint of it—indeed, I
was almost surprised into murmuring an
apology for having disturbed her by coming
in.

The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to
rise—she leaned slightly forward with a
conscientious expression—then she
laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh,
and I laughed too and came forward into the
room.

“I’m p-paralyzed with happiness.” She
laughed again, as if she said something
very witty, and held my hand for a moment,
looking up into my face, promising that
there was no one in the world she so much
wanted to see. That was a way she had.
She hinted in a murmur that the surname of
the balancing girl was Baker. (I’ve heard it
said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make
people lean toward her; an irrelevant
criticism that made it no less charming.)

At any rate, Miss Baker’s lips fluttered, she
nodded at me almost imperceptibly, and
then quickly tipped her head back again—the

Tom Buchanan, who had been hovering
restlessly about the room, stopped and
rested his hand on my shoulder.

“What you doing, Nick?”

“I’m a bond man.”

“Who with?”

I told him.

“Never heard of them,” he remarked
decisively.

This annoyed me.

“You will,” I answered shortly. “You will if you
stay in the East.”

“Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry,” he
said, glancing at Daisy and then back at
me, as if he were alert for something more.
“I’d be a God damned fool to live anywhere
else.”

At this point Miss Baker said: “Absolutely!”
with such suddenness that I started—it was
the first word she uttered since I came into
the room. Evidently it surprised her as much
as it did me, for she yawned and with a
series of rapid, deft movements stood up
into the room.

“I’m stiff,” she complained, “I’ve been lying
on that sofa for as long as I can remember.”

“Don’t look at me,” Daisy retorted, “I’ve
been trying to get you to New York all
afternoon.”

“No, thanks,” said Miss Baker to the four
cocktails just in from the pantry, “I’m
absolutely in training.”

Her host looked at her incredulously.

the longest day in the year and then miss it.”

“We ought to plan something,” yawned Miss
Baker, sitting down at the table as if she
were getting into bed.

“All right,” said Daisy. “What’ll we plan?” She
turned to me helplessly: “What do people
plan?”

Before I could answer her eyes fastened
with an awed expression on her little finger.

“Look!” she complained; “I hurt it.”

We all looked—the knuckle was black and
blue.

“You did it, Tom,” she said accusingly. “I
know you didn’t mean to, but you DID do it.
That’s what I get for marrying a brute of a
man, a great, big, hulking physical
specimen of a——”

“I hate that word hulking,” objected Tom
crossly, “even in kidding.”

“Hulking,” insisted Daisy.

Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at
once, unobtrusively and with a bantering
inconsequence that was never quite
chatter, that was as cool as their white
dresses and their impersonal eyes in the
absence of all desire. They were here, and
they accepted Tom and me, making only a
polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be
entertained. They knew that presently dinner
would be over and a little later the evening
too would be over and casually put away. It
was sharply different from the West, where
an evening was hurried from phase to
phase toward its close, in a continually
disappointed anticipation or else in sheer
nervous dread of the moment itself.

again. “—And we’ve produced all the things
that go to make civilization—oh, science and
art, and all that. Do you see?”

There was something pathetic in his
concentration, as if his complacency, more
acute than of old, was not enough to him any
more. When, almost immediately, the
telephone rang inside and the butler left the
porch Daisy seized upon the momentary
interruption and leaned toward me.

“I’ll tell you a family secret,” she whispered
enthusiastically. “It’s about the butler’s nose.
Do you want to hear about the butler’s
nose?”

“That’s why I came over to-night.”

“Well, he wasn’t always a butler; he used to
be the silver polisher for some people in
New York that had a silver service for two
hundred people. He had to polish it from
morning till night, until finally it began to
affect his nose——”

“Things went from bad to worse,”
suggested Miss Baker.

“Yes. Things went from bad to worse, until
finally he had to give up his position.”

For a moment the last sunshine fell with
romantic affection upon her glowing face;
her voice compelled me forward
breathlessly as I listened—then the glow
faded, each light deserting her with
lingering regret, like children leaving a
pleasant street at dusk.

The butler came back and murmured
something close to Tom’s ear, whereupon
Tom frowned, pushed back his chair, and
without a word went inside. As if his
absence quickened something within her,
Daisy leaned forward again, her voice

Miss Baker nodded.

“She might have the decency not to
telephone him at dinner time. Don’t you
think?”

Almost before I had grasped her meaning
there was the flutter of a dress and the
crunch of leather boots, and Tom and Daisy
were back at the table.

“It couldn’t be helped!” cried Daisy with
tense gaiety.

She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss
Baker and then at me, and continued: “I
looked outdoors for a minute, and it’s very
romantic outdoors. There’s a bird on the
lawn that I think must be a nightingale come
over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He’s
singing away——” Her voice sang: “It’s
romantic, isn’t it, Tom?”

“Very romantic,” he said, and then
miserably to me: “If it’s light enough after
dinner, I want to take you down to the
stables.”

The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and
as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom
the subject of the stables, in fact all
subjects, vanished into air. Among the
broken fragments of the last five minutes at
table I remember the candles being lit
again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of
wanting to look squarely at every one, and
yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn’t guess what
Daisy and Tom were thinking, but I doubt if
even Miss Baker, who seemed to have
mastered a certain hardy scepticism, was
able utterly to put this fifth guest’s shrill
metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain
temperament the situation might have
seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to
telephone immediately for the police.

abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse
right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told
me it was a girl, and so I turned my head
away and wept. ‘all right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad
it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s
the best thing a girl can be in this world, a
beautiful little fool.”

“You see I think everything’s terrible
anyhow,” she went on in a convinced way.
“Everybody thinks so—the most advanced
people. And I KNOW. I’ve been everywhere
and seen everything and done everything.”
Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant
way, rather like Tom’s, and she laughed
with thrilling scorn. “Sophisticated—God, I’m
sophisticated!”

The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to
compel my attention, my belief, I felt the
basic insincerity of what she had said. It
made me uneasy, as though the whole
evening had been a trick of some sort to
exact a contributory emotion from me. I
waited, and sure enough, in a moment she
looked at me with an absolute smirk on her
lovely face, as if she had asserted her
membership in a rather distinguished
secret society to which she and Tom
belonged.

Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light.

Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the
long couch and she read aloud to him from
the SATURDAY EVENING POST.—the
words, murmurous and uninflected, running
together in a soothing tune. The lamp-light,
bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-
leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the
paper as she turned a page with a flutter of
slender muscles in her arms.

When we came in she held us silent for a
moment with a lifted hand.

the country this way.”

“Who oughtn’t to?” inquired Daisy coldly.

“Her family.”

“Her family is one aunt about a thousand
years old. Besides, Nick’s going to look
after her, aren’t you, Nick? She’s going to
spend lots of week-ends out here this
summer. I think the home influence will be
very good for her.”

Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a
moment in silence.

“Is she from New York?” I asked quickly.

“From Louisville. Our white girlhood was
passed together there. Our beautiful
white——”

“Did you give Nick a little heart to heart talk
on the veranda?” demanded Tom suddenly.

“Did I?” She looked at me.

“I can’t seem to remember, but I think we
talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I’m sure
we did. It sort of crept up on us and first thing
you know——”

“Don’t believe everything you hear, Nick,”
he advised me.

I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all,
and a few minutes later I got up to go home.
They came to the door with me and stood
side by side in a cheerful square of light. As
I started my motor Daisy peremptorily
called: “Wait!”

“I forgot to ask you something, and it’s
important. We heard you were engaged to a
girl out West.”

feet away a figure had emerged from the
shadow of my neighbor’s mansion and was
standing with his hands in his pockets
regarding the silver pepper of the stars.
Something in his leisurely movements and
the secure position of his feet upon the lawn
suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself,
come out to determine what share was his
of our local heavens.

I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had
mentioned him at dinner, and that would do
for an introduction. But I didn’t call to him, for
he gave a sudden intimation that he was
content to be alone—he stretched out his
arms toward the dark water in a curious
way, and, far as I was from him, I could have
sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I
glanced seaward—and distinguished
nothing except a single green light, minute
and far away, that might have been the end
of a dock. When I looked once more for
Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone
again in the unquiet darkness.

Chapter 2

About half way between West Egg and New
York the motor road hastily joins the railroad
and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so
as to shrink away from a certain desolate
area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a
fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat
into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens;
where ashes take the forms of houses and
chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with
a transcendent effort, of men who move
dimly and already crumbling through the
powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray
cars crawls along an invisible track, gives
out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and
immediately the ash-gray men swarm up
with leaden spades and stir up an
impenetrable cloud, which screens their
obscure operations from your sight. But
above the gray land and the spasms of

I followed him over a low whitewashed
railroad fence, and we walked back a
hundred yards along the road under Doctor
Eckleburg’s persistent stare. The only
building in sight was a small block of yellow
brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a
sort of compact Main Street ministering to
it, and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One
of the three shops it contained was for rent
and another was an all-night restaurant,
approached by a trail of ashes; the third
was a garage—Repairs. GEORGE B.
WILSON. Cars bought and sold.—and I
followed Tom inside.

The interior was unprosperous and bare;
the only car visible was the dust-covered
wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim
corner. It had occurred to me that this
shadow of a garage must be a blind, and
that sumptuous and romantic apartments
were concealed overhead, when the
proprietor himself appeared in the door of
an office, wiping his hands on a piece of
waste. He was a blond, spiritless man,
anaemic, and faintly handsome. When he
saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into
his light blue eyes.

“Hello, Wilson, old man,” said Tom, slapping
him jovially on the shoulder. “How’s
business?”

“I can’t complain,” answered Wilson
unconvincingly. “When are you going to sell
me that car?”

“Next week; I’ve got my man working on it
now.”

“Works pretty slow, don’t he?”

“No, he doesn’t,” said Tom coldly. “And if
you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better
sell it somewhere else after all.”

setting torpedoes in a row along the railroad
track.

“Terrible place, isn’t it,” said Tom,
exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg.

“Awful.”

“It does her good to get away.”

“Doesn’t her husband object?”

“Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her
sister in New York. He’s so dumb he
doesn’t know he’s alive.”

So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up
together to New York—or not quite together,
for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car.
Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities
of those East Eggers who might be on the
train.

She had changed her dress to a brown
figured muslin, which stretched tight over
her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to
the platform in New York. At the news-stand
she bought a copy of TOWN TATTLE. and a
moving-picture magazine, and in the
station drug-store some cold cream and a
small flask of perfume. Up-stairs, in the
solemn echoing drive she let four taxicabs
drive away before she selected a new one,
lavender-colored with gray upholstery, and
in this we slid out from the mass of the
station into the glowing sunshine. But
immediately she turned sharply from the
window and, leaning forward, tapped on
the front glass.

“I want to get one of those dogs,” she said
earnestly. “I want to get one for the
apartment. They’re nice to have—a dog.”

We backed up to a gray old man who bore
an absurd resemblance to John D.

We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and
soft, almost pastoral, on the summer
Sunday afternoon that I wouldn’t have been
surprised to see a great flock of white
sheep turn the corner.

“Hold on,” I said, “I have to leave you here.”

“No, you don’t,” interposed Tom quickly.

“Myrtle’ll be hurt if you don’t come up to the
apartment. Won’t you, Myrtle?”

“Come on,” she urged. “I’ll telephone my
sister Catherine. She’s said to be very
beautiful by people who ought to know.”

“Well, I’d like to, but——”

We went on, cutting back again over the
Park toward the West Hundreds. At 158th
Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long
white cake of apartment-houses. Throwing
a regal homecoming glance around the
neighborhood, Mrs. Wilson gathered up her
dog and her other purchases, and went
haughtily in.

“I’m going to have the McKees come up,”
she announced as we rose in the elevator.
“And, of course, I got to call up my sister,
too.”

The apartment was on the top floor—a small
living-room, a small dining-room, a small
bedroom, and a bath. The living-room was
crowded to the doors with a set of
tapestried furniture entirely too large for it,
so that to move about was to stumble
continually over scenes of ladies swinging
in the gardens of Versailles. The only
picture was an over-enlarged photograph,
apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock.
Looked at from a distance, however, the
hen resolved itself into a bonnet, and the
countenance of a stout old lady beamed

clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets
jingled up and down upon her arms. She
came in with such a proprietary haste, and
looked around so possessively at the
furniture that I wondered if she lived here.
But when I asked her she laughed
immoderately, repeated my question aloud,
and told me she lived with a girl friend at a
hotel.

Mr. McKee was a pale, feminine man from
the flat below. He had just shaved, for there
was a white spot of lather on his
cheekbone, and he was most respectful in
his greeting to every one in the room. He
informed me that he was in the “artistic
game,” and I gathered later that he was a
photographer and had made the dim
enlargement of Mrs. Wilson’s mother which
hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall. His
wife was shrill, languid, handsome, and
horrible. She told me with pride that her
husband had photographed her a hundred
and twenty-seven times since they had
been married.

Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some
time before, and was now attired in an
elaborate afternoon dress of cream-
colored chiffon, which gave out a continual
rustle as she swept about the room. With the
influence of the dress her personality had
also undergone a change. The intense
vitality that had been so remarkable in the
garage was converted into impressive
hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her
assertions became more violently affected
moment by moment, and as she expanded
the room grew smaller around her, until she
seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking
pivot through the smoky air.

“My dear,” she told her sister in a high,
mincing shout, “most of these fellas will
cheat you every time. All they think of is
money. I had a woman up here last week to

said. “Get some more ice and mineral
water, Myrtle, before everybody goes to
sleep.”

“I told that boy about the ice.” Myrtle raised
her eyebrows in despair at the shiftlessness
of the lower orders. “These people! You
have to keep after them all the time.”

She looked at me and laughed pointlessly.
Then she flounced over to the dog, kissed it
with ecstasy, and swept into the kitchen,
implying that a dozen chefs awaited her
orders there.

“I’ve done some nice things out on Long
Island,” asserted Mr. McKee.

Tom looked at him blankly.

“Two of them we have framed down-
stairs.”

“Two what?” demanded Tom.

“Two studies. One of them I call MONTAUK
POINT—THE GULLS, and the other I call
MONTAUK POINT—THE SEA.”

The sister Catherine sat down beside me
on the couch.

“Do you live down on Long Island, too?” she
inquired.

“I live at West Egg.”

“Really? I was down there at a party about a
month ago. At a man named Gatsby’s. Do
you know him?”

“I live next door to him.”

“Well, they say he’s a nephew or a cousin of
Kaiser Wilhelm’s. That’s where all his
money comes from.”

“Doesn’t she like Wilson either?”

The answer to this was unexpected. It came
from Myrtle, who had overheard the
question, and it was violent and obscene.

“You see,” cried Catherine triumphantly.
She lowered her voice again. “It’s really his
wife that’s keeping them apart. She’s a
Catholic, and they don’t believe in divorce.”

Daisy was not a Catholic, and I was a little
shocked at the elaborateness of the lie.

“When they do get married,” continued
Catherine, “they’re going West to live for a
while until it blows over.”

“It’d be more discreet to go to Europe.”

“Oh, do you like Europe?” she exclaimed
surprisingly. “I just got back from Monte
Carlo.”

“Really.”

“Just last year. I went over there with another
girl.” “Stay long?”

“No, we just went to Monte Carlo and back.
We went by way of Marseilles. We had over
twelve hundred dollars when we started, but
we got gypped out of it all in two days in the
private rooms. We had an awful time getting
back, I can tell you. God, how I hated that
town!”

The late afternoon sky bloomed in the
window for a moment like the blue honey of
the Mediterranean—then the shrill voice of
Mrs. McKee called me back into the room.

“I almost made a mistake, too,” she
declared vigorously. “I almost married a little
kyke who’d been after me for years. I knew
he was below me. Everybody kept saying to

“She really ought to get away from him,”
resumed Catherine to me. “They’ve been
living over that garage for eleven years. And
tom’s the first sweetie she ever had.”

The bottle of whiskey—a second one—was
now in constant demand by all present,
excepting Catherine, who “felt just as good
on nothing at all.” Tom rang for the janitor
and sent him for some celebrated
sandwiches, which were a complete
supper in themselves. I wanted to get out
and walk southward toward the park
through the soft twilight, but each time I tried
to go I became entangled in some wild,
strident argument which pulled me back, as
if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the
city our line of yellow windows must have
contributed their share of human secrecy to
the casual watcher in the darkening streets,
and I was him too, looking up and
wondering. I was within and without,
simultaneously enchanted and repelled by
the inexhaustible variety of life.

Myrtle pulled her chair close to mine, and
suddenly her warm breath poured over me
the story of her first meeting with Tom.

“It was on the two little seats facing each
other that are always the last ones left on the
train. I was going up to New York to see my
sister and spend the night. He had on a
dress suit and patent leather shoes, and I
couldn’t keep my eyes off him, but every
time he looked at me I had to pretend to be
looking at the advertisement over his head.
When we came into the station he was next
to me, and his white shirt-front pressed
against my arm, and so I told him I’d have to
call a policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so
excited that when I got into a taxi with him I
didn’t hardly know I wasn’t getting into a
subway train. All I kept thinking about, over
and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you
can’t live forever.’”

his doze and started in a daze toward the
door. When he had gone half way he turned
around and stared at the scene—his wife and
Catherine scolding and consoling as they
stumbled here and there among the
crowded furniture with articles of aid, and
the despairing figure on the couch, bleeding
fluently, and trying to spread a copy of
TOWN TATTLE. over the tapestry scenes of
Versailles. Then Mr. McKee turned and
continued on out the door. Taking my hat
from the chandelier, I followed.

“Come to lunch some day,” he suggested,
as we groaned down in the elevator.

“Where?”

“Anywhere.”

“Keep your hands off the lever,” snapped
the elevator boy.

“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. McKee with
dignity, “I didn’t know I was touching it.”

“All right,” I agreed, “I’ll be glad to.”

. . . I was standing beside his bed and he
was sitting up between the sheets, clad in
his underwear, with a great portfolio in his
hands.

“Beauty and the Beast . . . Loneliness . . . Old
Grocery Horse . . . Brook’n Bridge . . . .”

Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower
level of the Pennsylvania Station, staring at
the morning TRIBUNE, and waiting for the
four o’clock train.

Chapter 3

There was music from my neighbor’s house
through the summer nights. In his blue
gardens men and girls came and went like

viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and
high drums. The last swimmers have come
in from the beach now and are dressing up-
stairs; the cars from New York are parked
five deep in the drive, and already the halls
and salons and verandas are gaudy with
primary colors, and hair shorn in strange
new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams
of Castile. The bar is in full swing, and
floating rounds of cocktails permeate the
garden outside, until the air is alive with
chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo
and introductions forgotten on the spot, and
enthusiastic meetings between women
who never knew each other’s names.

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches
away from the sun, and now the orchestra is
playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera
of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is
easier minute by minute, spilled with
prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word.
The groups change more swiftly, swell with
new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same
breath; already there are wanderers,
confident girls who weave here and there
among the stouter and more stable,
become for a sharp, joyous moment the
centre of a group, and then, excited with
triumph, glide on through the sea-change of
faces and voices and color under the
constantly changing light.

Suddenly one of the gypsies, in trembling
opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps
it down for courage and, moving her hands
like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas
platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra
leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her,
and there is a burst of chatter as the
erroneous news goes around that she is
Gilda Gray’s understudy from the FOLLIES.
The party has begun.

I believe that on the first night I went to
Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests

vehemently any knowledge of his
movements, that I slunk off in the direction
of the cocktail table—the only place in the
garden where a single man could linger
without looking purposeless and alone.

I was on my way to get roaring drunk from
sheer embarrassment when Jordan Baker
came out of the house and stood at the
head of the marble steps, leaning a little
backward and looking with contemptuous
interest down into the garden.

Welcome or not, I found it necessary to
attach myself to some one before I should
begin to address cordial remarks to the
passers-by.

“Hello!” I roared, advancing toward her. My
voice seemed unnaturally loud across the
garden.

“I thought you might be here,” she
responded absently as I came up. “I
remembered you lived next door to——” She
held my hand impersonally, as a promise
that she’d take care of me in a minute, and
gave ear to two girls in twin yellow dresses,
who stopped at the foot of the steps.

“Hello!” they cried together. “Sorry you didn’t
win.”

That was for the golf tournament. She had
lost in the finals the week before.

“You don’t know who we are,” said one of
the girls in yellow, “but we met you here
about a month ago.”

“You’ve dyed your hair since then,”
remarked Jordan, and I started, but the girls
had moved casually on and her remark was
addressed to the premature moon,
produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a
caterer’s basket. With Jordan’s slender

A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr.
Mumbles bent forward and listened eagerly.

“I don’t think it’s so much THAT,” argued
Lucille sceptically; “it’s more that he was a
German spy during the war.”

One of the men nodded in confirmation.

“I heard that from a man who knew all about
him, grew up with him in Germany,” he
assured us positively.

“Oh, no,” said the first girl, “it couldn’t be
that, because he was in the American army
during the war.” As our credulity switched
back to her she leaned forward with
enthusiasm. “You look at him sometimes
when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll
bet he killed a man.”

She narrowed her eyes and shivered.
Lucille shivered. We all turned and looked
around for Gatsby. It was testimony to the
romantic speculation he inspired that there
were whispers about him from those who
found little that it was necessary to whisper
about in this world.

The first supper—there would be another one
after midnight—was now being served, and
Jordan invited me to join her own party,
who were spread around a table on the
other side of the garden. There were three
married couples and Jordan’s escort, a
persistent undergraduate given to violent
innuendo, and obviously under the
impression that sooner or later Jordan was
going to yield him up her person to a greater
or lesser degree. Instead of rambling, this
party had preserved a dignified
homogeneity, and assumed to itself the
function of representing the staid nobility of
the country-side—East Egg condescending
to West Egg, and carefully on guard against
its spectroscopic gayety.

Taking our scepticism for granted, he
rushed to the bookcases and returned with
Volume One of the “Stoddard Lectures.”

“See!” he cried triumphantly. “It’s a bona-
fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me.
This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph.
What thoroughness! What realism! Knew
when to stop, too—didn’t cut the pages. But
what do you want? What do you expect?”

He snatched the book from me and
replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that
if one brick was removed the whole library
was liable to collapse.

“Who brought you?” he demanded. “Or did
you just come? I was brought. Most people
were brought.”

Jordan looked at him alertly, cheerfully,
without answering.

“I was brought by a woman named
Roosevelt,” he continued. “Mrs. Claud
Roosevelt. Do you know her? I met her
somewhere last night. I’ve been drunk for
about a week now, and I thought it might
sober me up to sit in a library.”

“Has it?”

“A little bit, I think. I can’t tell yet. I’ve only
been here an hour. Did I tell you about the
books? They’re real. They’re——”

“You told us.” We shook hands with him
gravely and went back outdoors.

There was dancing now on the canvas in the
garden; old men pushing young girls
backward in eternal graceless circles,
superior couples holding each other
tortuously, fashionably, and keeping in the
corners—and a great number of single girls
dancing individualistically or relieving the

“Want to go with me, old sport? Just near the
shore along the Sound.”

“What time?”

“Any time that suits you best.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask his
name when Jordan looked around and
smiled.

“Having a gay time now?” she inquired.

“Much better.” I turned again to my new
acquaintance. “This is an unusual party for
me. I haven’t even seen the host. I live over
there——” I waved my hand at the invisible
hedge in the distance, “and this man Gatsby
sent over his chauffeur with an invitation.”
For a moment he looked at me as if he
failed to understand.

“I’m Gatsby,” he said suddenly.

“What!” I exclaimed. “Oh, I beg your pardon.”

“I thought you knew, old sport. I’m afraid I’m
not a very good host.”

He smiled understandingly—much more than
understandingly. It was one of those rare
smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance
in it, that you may come across four or five
times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the
whole external world for an instant, and then
concentrated on you with an irresistible
prejudice in your favor. It understood you
just so far as you wanted to be understood,
believed in you as you would like to believe
in yourself, and assured you that it had
precisely the impression of you that, at your
best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that
point it vanished—and I was looking at an
elegant young rough-neck, a year or two
over thirty, whose elaborate formality of
speech just missed being absurd. Some

swamps of Louisiana or from the lower
East Side of New York. That was
comprehensible. But young men didn’t—at
least in my provincial inexperience I
believed they didn’t—drift coolly out of
nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island
Sound.

“Anyhow, he gives large parties,” said
Jordan, changing the subject with an
urbane distaste for the concrete. “And I like
large parties. They’re so intimate. At small
parties there isn’t any privacy.”

There was the boom of a bass drum, and
the voice of the orchestra leader rang out
suddenly above the echolalia of the garden.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he cried. “At the
request of Mr. Gatsby we are going to play
for you Mr. Vladimir Tostoff’s latest work,
which attracted so much attention at
Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the
papers, you know there was a big
sensation.” He smiled with jovial
condescension, and added: “Some
sensation!” Whereupon everybody laughed.

“The piece is known,” he concluded lustily,
“as Vladimir Tostoff’s JAZZ HISTORY OF
THE WORLD.”

The nature of Mr. Tostoff’s composition
eluded me, because just as it began my
eyes fell on Gatsby, standing alone on the
marble steps and looking from one group to
another with approving eyes. His tanned
skin was drawn attractively tight on his face
and his short hair looked as though it were
trimmed every day. I could see nothing
sinister about him. I wondered if the fact that
he was not drinking helped to set him off
from his guests, for it seemed to me that he
grew more correct as the fraternal hilarity
increased. When the JAZZ HISTORY OF
THE WORLD was over, girls were putting

champagne, and during the course of her
song she had decided, ineptly, that
everything was very, very sad—she was not
only singing, she was weeping too.
Whenever there was a pause in the song
she filled it with gasping, broken sobs, and
then took up the lyric again in a quavering
soprano. The tears coursed down her
cheeks—not freely, however, for when they
came into contact with her heavily beaded
eyelashes they assumed an inky color, and
pursued the rest of their way in slow black
rivulets. A humorous suggestion was made
that she sing the notes on her face,
whereupon she threw up her hands, sank
into a chair, and went off into a deep vinous
sleep.

“She had a fight with a man who says he’s
her husband,” explained a girl at my elbow.

I looked around. Most of the remaining
women were now having fights with men
said to be their husbands. Even Jordan’s
party, the quartet from East Egg, were rent
asunder by dissension. One of the men was
talking with curious intensity to a young
actress, and his wife, after attempting to
laugh at the situation in a dignified and
indifferent way, broke down entirely and
resorted to flank attacks—at intervals she
appeared suddenly at his side like an angry
diamond, and hissed: “You promised!” into
his ear.

The reluctance to go home was not
confined to wayward men. The hall was at
present occupied by two deplorably sober
men and their highly indignant wives. The
wives were sympathizing with each other in
slightly raised voices.

“Whenever he sees I’m having a good time
he wants to go home.”

“Never heard anything so selfish in my life.”

in the garden.

“Don’t mention it,” he enjoined me eagerly.
“Don’t give it another thought, old sport.”
The familiar expression held no more
familiarity than the hand which reassuringly
brushed my shoulder. “And don’t forget
we’re going up in the hydroplane to-morrow
morning, at nine o’clock.”

Then the butler, behind his shoulder:
“Philadelphia wants you on the ‘phone, sir.”

“All right, in a minute. Tell them I’ll be right
there. . . . good night.”

“Good night.”

“Good night.” He smiled—and suddenly there
seemed to be a pleasant significance in
having been among the last to go, as if he
had desired it all the time. “Good night, old
sport. . . . good night.”

But as I walked down the steps I saw that
the evening was not quite over. Fifty feet
from the door a dozen headlights
illuminated a bizarre and tumultuous scene.
In the ditch beside the road, right side up,
but violently shorn of one wheel, rested a
new coupe which had left Gatsby’s drive not
two minutes before. The sharp jut of a wall
accounted for the detachment of the wheel,
which was now getting considerable
attention from half a dozen curious
chauffeurs. However, as they had left their
cars blocking the road, a harsh, discordant
din from those in the rear had been audible
for some time, and added to the already
violent confusion of the scene.

A man in a long duster had dismounted from
the wreck and now stood in the middle of
the road, looking from the car to the tire and
from the tire to the observers in a pleasant,
puzzled way.

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,” some one 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 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.

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 five deep with throbbing
taxi-cabs, 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
outlined unintelligible 70 gestures inside.
Imagining that I, too, was hurrying toward
gayety 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
every one 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

“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 gray, 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 mustache of
perspiration appeared on her upper lip.
Nevertheless there was a vague
understanding that had to be tactfully broken
off before I was free.

Every one 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.

Chapter 4

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,

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. Schwartze (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 and so long 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
Meyer 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

hand.

He saw me looking with admiration at his
car.

“It’s pretty, isn’t it, old sport?” He jumped off
to give me a better view. “Haven’t you ever
seen it before?”

I’d seen it. Everybody had seen it. It was a
rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen
here and there in its monstrous length with
triumphant hat-boxes and supper-boxes
and tool-boxes, and terraced with a
labyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a
dozen suns. Sitting down behind many
layers of glass in a sort of green leather
conservatory, we started to town.

I had talked with him perhaps half a dozen
times in the past month and found, to my
disappointment, that he had little to say: So
my first impression, that he was a person of
some undefined consequence, had
gradually faded and he had become simply
the proprietor of an elaborate road-house
next door.

And then came that disconcerting ride. We
hadn’t reached West Egg village before
Gatsby began leaving his elegant
sentences unfinished and slapping himself
indecisively on the knee of his caramel-
colored suit.

“Look here, old sport,” he broke out
surprisingly. “What’s your opinion of me,
anyhow?” A little overwhelmed, I began the
generalized evasions which that question
deserves.

“Well, I’m going to tell you something about
my life,” he interrupted. “I don’t want you to
get a wrong idea of me from all these
stories you hear.”

incredulous laughter. The very phrases
were worn so threadbare that they evoked
no image except that of a turbaned
“character.” leaking sawdust at every pore
as he pursued a tiger through the Bois de
Boulogne.

“Then came the war, old sport. It was a
great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I
seemed to bear an enchanted life. I
accepted a commission as first lieutenant
when it began. In the Argonne Forest I took
two machine-gun detachments so far
forward that there was a half mile gap on
either side of us where the infantry couldn’t
advance. We stayed there two days and two
nights, a hundred and thirty men with sixteen
Lewis guns, and when the infantry came up
at last they found the insignia of three
German divisions among the piles of dead. I
was promoted to be a major, and every
Allied government gave me a
decoration—even Montenegro, little
Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!”

Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words
and nodded at them—with his smile. The
smile comprehended Montenegro’s
troubled history and sympathized with the
brave struggles of the Montenegrin people.
It appreciated fully the chain of national
circumstances which had elicited this
tribute from Montenegro’s warm little heart.
My incredulity was submerged in
fascination now; it was like skimming
hastily through a dozen magazines.

He reached in his pocket, and a piece of
metal, slung on a ribbon, fell into my palm.

“That’s the one from Montenegro.”

To my astonishment, the thing had an
authentic look.

“Orderi di Danilo,” ran the circular legend,

matter.”

I hadn’t the faintest idea what “this matter.”
was, but I was more annoyed than
interested. I hadn’t asked Jordan to tea in
order to discuss Mr. Jay Gatsby. I was sure
the request would be something utterly
fantastic, and for a moment I was sorry I’d
ever set foot upon his overpopulated lawn.

He wouldn’t say another word. His
correctness grew on him as we neared the
city. We passed Port Roosevelt, where
there was a glimpse of red-belted ocean-
going ships, and sped along a cobbled
slum lined with the dark, undeserted
saloons of the faded-gilt nineteen-
hundreds. Then the valley of ashes opened
out on both sides of us, and I had a glimpse
of Mrs. Wilson straining at the garage pump
with panting vitality as we went by.

With fenders spread like wings we
scattered light through half Long Island
City—only half, for as we twisted among the
pillars of the elevated I heard the familiar
“jug—jug—SPAT!” of a motorcycle, and a
frantic policeman rode alongside.

“All right, old sport,” called Gatsby. We
slowed down. Taking a white card from his
wallet, he waved it before the man’s eyes.

“Right you are,” agreed the policeman,
tipping his cap. “Know you next time, Mr.
Gatsby. Excuse ME!”

“What was that?” I inquired.

“The picture of Oxford?”

“I was able to do the commissioner a favor
once, and he sends me a Christmas card
every year.”

Over the great bridge, with the sunlight

“—So I took one look at him,” said Mr.
Wolfshiem, shaking my hand earnestly, “and
what do you think I did?”

“What?” I inquired politely.

But evidently he was not addressing me, for
he dropped my hand and covered Gatsby
with his expressive nose.

“I handed the money to Katspaugh and I sid:
‘all right, Katspaugh, don’t pay him a penny
till he shuts his mouth.’ He shut it then and
there.”

Gatsby took an arm of each of us and
moved forward into the restaurant,
whereupon Mr. Wolfshiem swallowed a new
sentence he was starting and lapsed into a
somnambulatory abstraction.

“Highballs?” asked the head waiter.

“This is a nice restaurant here,” said Mr.
Wolfshiem, looking at the Presbyterian
nymphs on the ceiling. “But I like across the
street better!”

“Yes, highballs,” agreed Gatsby, and then to
Mr. Wolfshiem: “It’s too hot over there.”

“Hot and small—yes,” said Mr. Wolfshiem,
“but full of memories.”

“What place is that?” I asked.

“The old Metropole.

“The old Metropole,” brooded Mr.
Wolfshiem gloomily. “Filled with faces dead
and gone. Filled with friends gone now
forever. I can’t forget so long as I live the
night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there. It was
six of us at the table, and Rosy had eat and
drunk a lot all evening. When it was almost
morning the waiter came up to him with a

meanwhile, roved very slowly all around the
room—he completed the arc by turning to
inspect the people directly behind. I think
that, except for my presence, he would have
taken one short glance beneath our own
table.

“Look here, old sport,” said Gatsby, leaning
toward me, “I’m afraid I made you a little
angry this morning in the car.”

There was the smile again, but this time I
held out against it.

“I don’t like mysteries,” I answered. “And I
don’t understand why you won’t come out
frankly and tell me what you want. Why has it
all got to come through Miss Baker?”

“Oh, it’s nothing underhand,” he assured
me. “Miss Baker’s a great sportswoman,
you know, and she’d never do anything that
wasn’t all right.”

Suddenly he looked at his watch, jumped
up, and hurried from the room, leaving me
with Mr. Wolfshiem at the table.

“He has to telephone,” said Mr. Wolfshiem,
following him with his eyes. “Fine fellow,
isn’t he? Handsome to look at and a perfect
gentleman.”

“Yes.”

“He’s an Oggsford man.”

“Oh!”

“He went to Oggsford College in England.
You know Oggsford College?”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“It’s one of the most famous colleges in the
world.”

hand. “As for me, I am fifty years old, and I
won’t impose myself on you any longer.”

As he shook hands and turned away his
tragic nose was trembling. I wondered if I
had said anything to offend him.

“He becomes very sentimental sometimes,”
explained Gatsby. “This is one of his
sentimental days. He’s quite a character
around New York—a denizen of Broadway.”

“Who is he, anyhow, an actor?”

“No.”

“A dentist?”

“Meyer Wolfshiem? No, he’s a gambler.”
Gatsby hesitated, then added coolly: “He’s
the man who fixed the World’s Series back
in 1919.”

“Fixed the World’s Series?” I repeated.

The idea staggered me. I remembered, of
course, that the World’s Series had been
fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I
would have thought of it as a thing that
merely HAPPENED, the end of some
inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that
one man could start to play with the faith of
fifty million people—with the single-
mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.

“How did he happen to do that?” I asked
after a minute.

“He just saw the opportunity.”

“Why isn’t he in jail?”

“They can’t get him, old sport. He’s a smart
man.”

I insisted on paying the check. As the waiter

the lawns belonged to Daisy Fay’s house.
She was just eighteen, two years older than
me, and by far the most popular of all the
young girls in Louisville. She dressed in
white, and had a little white roadster, and all
day long the telephone rang in her house
and excited young officers from Camp
Taylor demanded the privilege of
monopolizing her that night. “Anyways, for
an hour!”

When I came opposite her house that
morning her white roadster was beside the
curb, and she was sitting in it with a
lieutenant I had never seen before. They
were so engrossed in each other that she
didn’t see me until I was five feet away.

“Hello, Jordan,” she called unexpectedly.
“Please come here.”

I was flattered that she wanted to speak to
me, because of all the older girls I admired
her most. She asked me if I was going to the
Red Cross and make bandages. I was.
Well, then, would I tell them that she couldn’t
come that day? The officer looked at Daisy
while she was speaking, in a way that every
young girl wants to be looked at sometime,
and because it seemed romantic to me I
have remembered the incident ever since.
His name was Jay Gatsby, and I didn’t lay
eyes on him again for over four years—even
after I’d met him on Long Island I didn’t
realize it was the same man.

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 rumors were circulating about her—how
her mother had found her packing her bag
one winter night to go to New York and say
good-by to a soldier who was going
overseas. She was effectually prevented,

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 into 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

“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 splendor.

“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 a 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:

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 to-
morrow and invite her over here to tea.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” he said carelessly. “I

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,

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

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,

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

“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

“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,
and 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 mid-summer

“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
blond 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.

“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 good-by 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 whe 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.

Chapter 6

About this time an ambitious young reporter
from New York arrived one morning at

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-
absorbtion 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

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 gray, 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

“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.”

“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

“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

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.

“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

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 sidewalks
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 7

It 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

So the whole caravansary had fallen in like
a card house at the disapproval in her eyes.

“They’re some people Wolfshiem wanted to
do something for. They’re all brothers and
sisters. They used to run a small hotel.”

“I see.”

He was calling up at Daisy’s request—would
I come to lunch at her house to-morrow?
Miss Baker would be there. Half an hour
later Daisy herself telephoned and seemed
relieved to find that I was coming.
Something was up. And yet I couldn’t
believe that they would choose this
occasion for a scene—especially for the
rather harrowing scene that Gatsby had
outlined in the garden.

The next day was broiling, almost the last,
certainly the warmest, of the summer. As
my train emerged from the tunnel into
sunlight, only the hot whistles of the National
Biscuit Company broke the simmering hush
at noon. The straw seats of the car hovered
on the edge of combustion; the woman next
to me perspired delicately for a while into
her white shirtwaist, and then, as her
newspaper dampened under her fingers,
lapsed despairingly into deep heat with a
desolate cry. Her pocket-book slapped to
the floor.

“Oh, my!” she gasped.

I picked it up with a weary bend and handed
it back to her, holding it at arm’s length and
by the extreme tip of the corners to indicate
that I had no designs upon it—but every one
near by, including the woman, suspected
me just the same.

“Hot!” said the conductor to familiar faces.
“Some weather! hot! hot! hot! Is it hot
enough for you? Is it hot? Is it . . . ?”

carpet and gazed around with fascinated
eyes. Daisy watched him and laughed, her
sweet, exciting laugh; a tiny gust of powder
rose from her bosom into the air.

“The rumor is,” whispered Jordan, “that
that’s Tom’s girl on the telephone.”

We were silent. The voice in the hall rose
high with annoyance: “Very well, then, I
won’t sell you the car at all. . . . I’m under no
obligations to you at all . . . and as for your
bothering me about it at lunch time, I won’t
stand that at all!”

“Holding down the receiver,” said Daisy
cynically.

“No, he’s not,” I assured her. “It’s a bona-
fide deal. I happen to know about it.”

Tom flung open the door, blocked out its
space for a moment with his thick body, and
hurried into the room.

“Mr. Gatsby!” He put out his broad, flat hand
with well-concealed dislike. “I’m glad to see
you, sir. . . . Nick. . . .”

“Make us a cold drink,” cried Daisy.

As he left the room again she got up and
went over to Gatsby and pulled his face
down, kissing him on the mouth.

“You know I love you,” she murmured.

“You forget there’s a lady present,” said
Jordan.

Daisy looked around doubtfully.

“You kiss Nick too.”

“What a low, vulgar girl!”

took a step forward and held out her hand.

“Come, Pammy.”

“Good-by, sweetheart!”

With a reluctant backward glance the well-
disciplined child held to her nurse’s hand
and was pulled out the door, just as Tom
came back, preceding four gin rickeys that
clicked full of ice.

Gatsby took up his drink.

“They certainly look cool,” he said, with
visible tension.

We drank in long, greedy swallows.

“I read somewhere that the sun’s getting
hotter every year,” said Tom genially. “It
seems that pretty soon the earth’s going to
fall into the sun—or wait a minute—it’s just the
opposite—the sun’s getting colder every
year.

“Come outside,” he suggested to Gatsby,
“I’d like you to have a look at the place.”

I went with them out to the veranda. On the
green Sound, stagnant in the heat, one
small sail crawled slowly toward the fresher
sea. Gatsby’s eyes followed it momentarily;
he raised his hand and pointed across the
bay.

“I’m right across from you.”

“So you are.”

Our eyes lifted over the rose-beds and the
hot lawn and the weedy refuse of the dog-
days along-shore. Slowly the white wings
of the boat moved against the blue cool limit
of the sky. Ahead lay the scalloped ocean
and the abounding blessed isles.

“You resemble the advertisement of the
man,” she went on innocently. “You know the
advertisement of the man——”

“All right,” broke in Tom quickly, “I’m
perfectly willing to go to town. Come
on—we’re all going to town.”

He got up, his eyes still flashing between
Gatsby and his wife. No one moved.

“Come on!” His temper cracked a little.
“What’s the matter, anyhow? If we’re going
to town, let’s start.”

His hand, trembling with his effort at self-
control, bore to his lips the last of his glass
of ale. Daisy’s voice got us to our feet and
out on to the blazing gravel drive.

“Are we just going to go?” she objected.
“Like this? Aren’t we going to let any one
smoke a cigarette first?”

“Everybody smoked all through lunch.”

“Oh, let’s have fun,” she begged him. “It’s
too hot to fuss.” He didn’t answer.

“Have it your own way,” she said. “Come
on, Jordan.”

They went up-stairs to get ready while we
three men stood there shuffling the hot
pebbles with our feet. A silver curve of the
moon hovered already in the western sky.
Gatsby started to speak, changed his mind,
but not before Tom wheeled and faced him
expectantly.

“Have you got your stables here?” asked
Gatsby with an effort.

“About a quarter of a mile down the road.”

“Oh.”

The suggestion was distasteful to Gatsby.

“I don’t think there’s much gas,” he
objected.

“Plenty of gas,” said Tom boisterously. He
looked at the gauge. “And if it runs out I can
stop at a drug-store. You can buy anything
at a drug-store nowadays.”

A pause followed this apparently pointless
remark. Daisy looked at Tom frowning, and
an indefinable expression, at once
definitely unfamiliar and vaguely
recognizable, as if I had only heard it
described in words, passed over Gatsby’s
face.

“Come on, Daisy,” said Tom, pressing her
with his hand toward Gatsby’s car. “I’ll take
you in this circus wagon.”

He opened the door, but she moved out
from the circle of his arm.

“You take Nick and Jordan. We’ll follow you
in the coupe.”

She walked close to Gatsby, touching his
coat with her hand. Jordan and Tom and I
got into the front seat of Gatsby’s car, Tom
pushed the unfamiliar gears tentatively, and
we shot off into the oppressive heat, leaving
them out of sight behind.

“Did you see that?” demanded Tom.

“See what?”

He looked at me keenly, realizing that
Jordan and I must have known all along.

“You think I’m pretty dumb, don’t you?” he
suggested. “Perhaps I am, but I have
a—almost a second sight, sometimes, that
tells me what to do. Maybe you don’t believe

“We’ve got enough to get us to town,” said
Tom.

“But there’s a garage right here,” objected
Jordan. “I don’t want to get stalled in this
baking heat.” Tom threw on both brakes
impatiently, and we slid to an abrupt dusty
stop under Wilson’s sign. After a moment
the proprietor emerged from the interior of
his establishment and gazed hollow-eyed
at the car.

“Let’s have some gas!” cried Tom roughly.
“What do you think we stopped for—to admire
the view?”

“I’m sick,” said Wilson without moving.
“Been sick all day.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m all run down.”

“Well, shall I help myself?” Tom demanded.
“You sounded well enough on the phone.”

With an effort Wilson left the shade and
support of the doorway and, breathing hard,
unscrewed the cap of the tank. In the
sunlight his face was green.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt your lunch,” he
said. “But I need money pretty bad, and I
was wondering what you were going to do
with your old car.”

“How do you like this one?” inquired Tom. “I
bought it last week.”

“It’s a nice yellow one,” said Wilson, as he
strained at the handle.

“Like to buy it?”

“Big chance,” Wilson smiled faintly. “No, but I
could make some money on the other.”

“I’ll let you have that car,” said Tom. “I’ll send
it over to-morrow afternoon.”

That locality was always vaguely
disquieting, even in the broad glare of
afternoon, and now I turned my head as
though I had been warned of something
behind. Over the ashheaps the giant eyes of
Doctor T. J. Eckleburg kept their vigil, but I
perceived, after a moment, that other eyes
were regarding us with peculiar intensity
from less than twenty feet away.

In one of the windows over the garage the
curtains had been moved aside a little, and
Myrtle Wilson was peering down at the car.
So engrossed was she that she had no
consciousness of being observed, and one
emotion after another crept into her face
like objects into a slowly developing
picture. Her expression was curiously
familiar—it was an expression I had often
seen on women’s faces, but on Myrtle
Wilson’s face it seemed purposeless and
inexplicable until I realized that her eyes,
wide with jealous terror, were fixed not on
Tom, but on Jordan Baker, whom she took
to be his wife.

There is no confusion like the confusion of a
simple mind, and as we drove away Tom
was feeling the hot whips of panic. His wife
and his mistress, until an hour ago secure
and inviolate, were slipping precipitately
from his control. Instinct made him step on
the accelerator with the double purpose of
overtaking Daisy and leaving Wilson behind,
and we sped along toward Astoria at fifty
miles an hour, until, among the spidery
girders of the elevated, we came in sight of
the easy-going blue coupe.

“Those big movies around Fiftieth Street
are cool,” suggested Jordan. “I love New
York on summer afternoons when every
one’s away. There’s something very

baths, and then assumed more tangible
form as “a place to have a mint julep.” Each
of us said over and over that it was a “crazy
idea.”—we all talked at once to a baffled
clerk and thought, or pretended to think, that
we were being very funny. . . .

The room was large and stifling, and,
though it was already four o’clock, opening
the windows admitted Only a gust of hot
shrubbery from the Park. Daisy went to the
mirror and stood with her back to us, fixing
her hair.

“It’s a swell suite,” whispered Jordan
respectfully, and every one laughed.

“Open another window,” commanded
Daisy, without turning around.

“There aren’t any more.”

“Well, we’d better telephone for an axe——”

“The thing to do is to forget about the heat,”
said Tom impatiently. “You make it ten times
worse by crabbing about it.”

He unrolled the bottle of whiskey from the
towel and put it on the table.

“Why not let her alone, old sport?” remarked
Gatsby. “You’re the one that wanted to
come to town.”

There was a moment of silence. The
telephone book slipped from its nail and
splashed to the floor, whereupon Jordan
whispered, “Excuse me.”—but this time no
one laughed.

“I’ll pick it up,” I offered.

“I’ve got it.” Gatsby examined the parted
string, muttered “Hum!” in an interested
way, and tossed the book on a chair.

“That was his cousin. I knew his whole
family history before he left. He gave me an
aluminum putter that I use to-day.”

The music had died down as the ceremony
began and now a long cheer floated in at the
window, followed by intermittent cries of
“Yea-ea-ea!” and finally by a burst of jazz
as the dancing began.

“We’re getting old,” said Daisy. “If we were
young we’d rise and dance.”

“Remember Biloxi,” Jordan warned her.
“Where’d you know him, Tom?”

“Biloxi?” He concentrated with an effort. “I
didn’t know him. He was a friend of
Daisy’s.”

“He was not,” she denied. “I’d never seen
him before. He came down in the private
car.”

“Well, he said he knew you. He said he was
raised in Louisville. Asa Bird brought him
around at the last minute and asked if we
had room for him.”

Jordan smiled.

“He was probably bumming his way home.
He told me he was president of your class at
Yale.”

Tom and I looked at each other blankly.

“Biloxi?”

“First place, we didn’t have any president——”

Gatsby’s foot beat a short, restless tattoo
and Tom eyed him suddenly.

“By the way, Mr. Gatsby, I understand you’re
an Oxford man.”

ask Mr. Gatsby one more question.”

“Go on,” Gatsby said politely.

“What kind of a row are you trying to cause in
my house anyhow?”

They were out in the open at last and Gatsby
was content.

“He isn’t causing a row.” Daisy looked
desperately from one to the other. “You’re
causing a row. Please have a little self-
control.”

“Self-control!” Repeated Tom
incredulously. “I suppose the latest thing is
to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from
Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if
that’s the idea you can count me out. . . .
Nowadays people begin by sneering at
family life and family institutions, and next
they’ll throw everything overboard and have
intermarriage between black and white.”

Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he
saw himself standing alone on the last
barrier of civilization.

“We’re all white here,” murmured Jordan.

“I know I’m not very popular. I don’t give big
parties. I suppose you’ve got to make your
house into a pigsty in order to have any
friends—in the modern world.”

Angry as I was, as we all were, I was
tempted to laugh whenever he opened his
mouth. The transition from libertine to prig
was so complete.

“I’ve got something to tell YOU, old sport——”
began Gatsby. But Daisy guessed at his
intention.

“Please don’t!” she interrupted helplessly.

time, old sport, and you didn’t know. I used
to laugh sometimes.”—but there was no
laughter in his eyes——” to think that you didn’t
know.”

“Oh—that’s all.” Tom tapped his thick fingers
together like a clergyman and leaned back
in his chair.

“You’re crazy!” he exploded. “I can’t speak
about what happened five years ago,
because I didn’t know Daisy then—and I’ll be
damned if I see how you got within a mile of
her unless you brought the groceries to the
back door. But all the rest of that’s a God
damned lie. Daisy loved me when she
married me and she loves me now.”

“No,” said Gatsby, shaking his head.

“She does, though. The trouble is that
sometimes she gets foolish ideas in her
head and doesn’t know what she’s doing.”
He nodded sagely. “And what’s more, I love
Daisy too. Once in a while I go off on a
spree and make a fool of myself, but I
always come back, and in my heart I love
her all the time.”

“You’re revolting,” said Daisy. She turned to
me, and her voice, dropping an octave
lower, filled the room with thrilling scorn:
“Do you know why we left Chicago? I’m
surprised that they didn’t treat you to the
story of that little spree.”

Gatsby walked over and stood beside her.

“Daisy, that’s all over now,” he said
earnestly. “It doesn’t matter any more. Just
tell him the truth—that you never loved
him—and it’s all wiped out forever.”

She looked at him blindly. “Why—how could I
love him—possibly?”

never know, things that neither of us can
ever forget.”

The words seemed to bite physically into
Gatsby.

“I want to speak to Daisy alone,” he insisted.
“She’s all excited now——”

“Even alone I can’t say I never loved Tom,”
she admitted in a pitiful voice. “It wouldn’t be
true.”

“Of course it wouldn’t,” agreed Tom.

She turned to her husband.

“As if it mattered to you,” she said.

“Of course it matters. I’m going to take
better care of you from now on.”

“You don’t understand,” said Gatsby, with a
touch of panic. “You’re not going to take
care of her any more.”

“I’m not?” Tom opened his eyes wide and
laughed. He could afford to control himself
now. “Why’s that?”

“Daisy’s leaving you.”

“Nonsense.”

“I am, though,” she said with a visible effort.

“She’s not leaving me!” Tom’s words
suddenly leaned down over Gatsby.
“Certainly not for a common swindler who’d
have to steal the ring he put on her finger.”

“I won’t stand this!” cried Daisy. “Oh, please
let’s get out.”

“Who are you, anyhow?” broke out Tom.
“You’re one of that bunch that hangs around

her chin. Then I turned back to Gatsby—and
was startled at his expression. He
looked—and this is said in all contempt for
the babbled slander of his garden—as if he
had “killed a man.” For a moment the set of
his face could be described in just that
fantastic way.

It passed, and he began to talk excitedly to
Daisy, denying everything, defending his
name against accusations that had not
been made. But with every word she was
drawing further and further into herself, so
he gave that up, and only the dead dream
fought on as the afternoon slipped away,
trying to touch what was no longer tangible,
struggling unhappily, undespairingly,
toward that lost voice across the room.

The voice begged again to go.

“PLEASE, Tom! I can’t stand this any
more.”

Her frightened eyes told that whatever
intentions, whatever courage, she had had,
were definitely gone.

“You two start on home, Daisy,” said Tom.
“In Mr. Gatsby’s car.”

She looked at Tom, alarmed now, but he
insisted with magnanimous scorn.

“Go on. He won’t annoy you. I think he
realizes that his presumptuous little flirtation
is over.”

They were gone, without a word, snapped
out, made accidental, isolated, like ghosts,
even from our pity.

After a moment Tom got up and began
wrapping the unopened bottle of whiskey in
the towel.

George Wilson sick in his office—really sick,
pale as his own pale hair and shaking all
over. Michaelis advised him to go to bed,
but Wilson refused, saying that he’d miss a
lot of business if he did. While his neighbor
was trying to persuade him a violent racket
broke out overhead.

“I’ve got my wife locked in up there,”
explained Wilson calmly. “She’s going to
stay there till the day after to-morrow, and
then we’re going to move away.”

Michaelis was astonished; they had been
neighbors for four years, and Wilson had
never seemed faintly capable of such a
statement. Generally he was one of these
worn-out men: when he wasn’t working, he
sat on a chair in the doorway and stared at
the people and the cars that passed along
the road. When any one spoke to him he
invariably laughed in an agreeable,
colorless way. He was his wife’s man and
not his own.

So naturally Michaelis tried to find out what
had happened, but Wilson wouldn’t say a
word—instead he began to throw curious,
suspicious glances at his visitor and ask
him what he’d been doing at certain times
on certain days. Just as the latter was
getting uneasy, some workmen came past
the door bound for his restaurant, and
Michaelis took the opportunity to get away,
intending to come back later. But he didn’t.
He supposed he forgot to, that’s all. When
he came outside again, a little after seven,
he was reminded of the conversation
because he heard Mrs. Wilson’s voice, loud
and scolding, down-stairs in the garage.

“Beat me!” he heard her cry. “Throw me
down and beat me, you dirty little coward!”

A moment later she rushed out into the
dusk, waving her hands and

itself into the words “Oh, my God!” uttered
over and over in a gasping moan.

“There’s some bad trouble here,” said Tom
excitedly.

He reached up on tiptoes and peered over a
circle of heads into the garage, which was
lit only by a yellow light in a swinging wire
basket overhead. Then he made a harsh
sound in his throat, and with a violent
thrusting movement of his powerful arms
pushed his way through.

The circle closed up again with a running
murmur of expostulation; it was a minute
before I could see anything at all. Then new
arrivals deranged the line, and Jordan and I
were pushed suddenly inside.

Myrtle Wilson’s body, wrapped in a blanket,
and then in another blanket, as though she
suffered from a chill in the hot night, lay on a
work-table by the wall, and Tom, with his
back to us, was bending over it, motionless.
Next to him stood a motorcycle policeman
taking down names with much sweat and
correction in a little book. At first I couldn’t
find the source of the high, groaning words
that echoed clamorously through the bare
garage—then I saw Wilson standing on the
raised threshold of his office, swaying back
and forth and holding to the doorposts with
both hands. Some man was talking to him in
a low voice and attempting, from time to
time, to lay a hand on his shoulder, but
Wilson neither heard nor saw. His eyes
would drop slowly from the swinging light to
the laden table by the wall, and then jerk
back to the light again, and he gave out
incessantly his high, horrible call:

“Oh, my Ga-od! Oh, my Ga-od! oh, Ga-od!
oh, my Ga-od!”

Presently Tom lifted his head with a jerk

“It was a yellow car,” he said, “big yellow
car. New.”

“See the accident?” asked the policeman.

“No, but the car passed me down the road,
going faster’n forty. Going fifty, sixty.”

“Come here and let’s have your name. Look
out now. I want to get his name.”

Some words of this conversation must have
reached Wilson, swaying in the office door,
for suddenly a new theme found voice
among his gasping cries:

“You don’t have to tell me what kind of car it
was! I know what kind of car it was!”

Watching Tom, I saw the wad of muscle
back of his shoulder tighten under his coat.
He walked quickly over to Wilson and,
standing in front of him, seized him firmly by
the upper arms.

“You’ve got to pull yourself together,” he
said with soothing gruffness.

Wilson’s eyes fell upon Tom; he started up
on his tiptoes and then would have
collapsed to his knees had not Tom held
him upright.

“Listen,” said Tom, shaking him a little. “I
just got here a minute ago, from New York. I
was bringing you that coupe we’ve been
talking about. That yellow car I was driving
this afternoon wasn’t mine—do you hear? I
haven’t seen it all afternoon.”

Only the negro and I were near enough to
hear what he said, but the policeman caught
something in the tone and looked over with
truculent eyes.

“What’s all that?” he demanded.

“The God damned coward!” he whimpered.
“He didn’t even stop his car.”

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 to-night.”

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

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 to-morrow,” 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

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.

Chapter 8

I couldn’t sleep all night; a fog-horn 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

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 up-
stairs 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
motor-cars 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 pretenses. 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 stratum 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,