Chapter one of the Great Gatsby. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Once again, tis Zelda, Then where the gold hat? If that
will move her? If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
till she cry, lover, gold hatted, high bouncing lover, I must
have you, Thomas Parke d'anvilliers, chapter one. In my younger and more
vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in
my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me,
just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that
you've had. He didn't say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative
in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more
than that. In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit
that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim
of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and
attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so
it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician.
Because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most
of the confidences were unsought. Frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation or a
hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering
on the horizon. For the intimate revelations of young men, or at least
the terms in which they expressed them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious
suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a
little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested,
and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out
unequally at birth. And after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come
to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the
hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don't care
what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn,
I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort
of moral attention forever. I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into
the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this
book, was exempt from my reaction. Gatsby, who represented everything for which
I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures,
then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises
of life, as if he were related to one of those 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 or 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 middlewestern
city for three generations. The carraways are something of a clan, and we
have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Bucclu. But the actual
founder of my line was my grandfather's brother, who came here in fifty one,
sent us substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business
that my father carries on today. 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 Newhaven in nineteen fifteen,
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
center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like a ragged edge of
the universe. So I decided to go east and learned 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 yes,
with very grave hesitant faces father agreed to finance me for a year,
and after various delays, I came east permanently. I thought in the spring
of twenty two the practical thing was to find rooms in the city. But
it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide
lawns and friendly trees. So when a young man at the office suggested that
we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great
idea. He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a
month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and
I went out to the country alone. I had a dog, at least
I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old
dodge, and a finishwoman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish
wisdom to herself over the electric stove. It was lonely for a day or
so until one morning some man more recently arrived than I stopped me on the
road. How do you get to West Egg Village, he asked, helplessly.
I told him, And as I walked on, I was lonely.
No longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler.
He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood. And so with
the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as
things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning
over again with the summer. There was so much to read, for one
thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young,
breath giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and
investment securities, and they stood on my shelf and reading gold, like new
money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and
Morgan and messinists 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 wonder to the gulls that fly overhead to the wingless.
A more interesting phenomena 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 bazaar, 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 hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side,
spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool,
and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby's mansion,
or rather, as I didn't know mister Gatsby, it was a mansion
inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eyesore,
but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked. So I
had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn,
and the consoling proximity of millionaires, all for eighty dollars a month. Across
the courtesy bay, the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water,
and the history of the summer really begins. On the evening I drove
over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin,
once removed, and I had known Tom in college, and just after
the war I spent two days with them in Chicago, her husband, among
various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played
football at New Haven, a national figure in a way, one of those
men who reached such an acute limited excellence at twenty one that everything afterwards savors
of anti climax. His family were enormously wealthy. Even in college, his
freedom with money was a matter for reproach. But now he'd left Chicago and
come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away. For instance,
he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard
to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.
Why they came east, I don't know. They had spent a year
in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully,
wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move,
said Daisy over the telephone. But I 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 that 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 lawns started at the beach and ran towards
the 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 the 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 in Newhaven who had hated his guts.
Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final, he seemed to
say, just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are.
We were in the same senior society, and while we were never intimate,
I always had the impression that he had approved of me and wanted me to
like him, with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own. We talked
for a few minutes on the sunny porch. I've got a nice place here,
he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly. Turning me around by one
arm, he moved a broad, flat hand along the front vista, including
in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep, pungent
roses, and a snub nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore.
It belonged to Domaine, the oil man. He turned me around again,
politely and abruptly. We'll go inside. He walked through a high hallway into
a bright, rosy colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows
at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass
outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew
through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like
pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling,
and then rippled over the wine colored rug, making a shadow on it as
wind does on the sea. The only completely stationary object in the room was
an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though 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 wisp 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 pa 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 object she was balancing had obviously tottered
a little and given her something of a fright. Again, a sort of
apology arose to my lips, almost an exhibition of complete self sufficiency draws a
stun tribute from me. I looked back at my cousin, who began to
ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of
voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an
arrangement of that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely,
with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright, passionate mouth.
But there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for
her found difficult to forget, a singing compulsion, a whispered listen I promise
that she had done gay exciting things just a while since, and that there
were gay exciting things hovering in the next hour. I told her how I
had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way east, and how
a dozen people had sent their love through me. Do they miss me?
She cried ecstatically. The whole town is desolate. All the cars have left,
rear wheel painted black as a morning wreath, and there's a persistent whale
all night along the north shore. How gorgeous. Let's go back tom tomorrow.
Then she added, irrelevantly. You ought to see the baby, I'd
like to She's asleep. She's three years old. Haven't you ever seen her?
Never? Well, you ought to see her. She's Tom Buchanan,
who had been hovering restlessly about the room, stopped and rested his hand on
my shoulder. What are you doing, Nick, I'm a bondman 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 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 goddamn fool to live anywhere else.
At this point, Miss Baker said absolutely, with such sudden as that
I started. It was the first word she had 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 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 front of the pantry. I'm absolutely
in training. Her host looked at her incredulously. You are, He took
down his drink, as if it were a drop in the bottom of glass.
How you ever get anything done is beyond me. I looked at Miss
Baker, wondering what it was she got done. I enjoyed looking at her.
She was a slender, small breasted girl with an erect carriage, which
she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet.
Her gray sunstrained eyes looked back at me with polite, reciprocal curiosity out of
a low, charming, discontented face. It occurred to me now that I
had seen her, or a picture of her somewhere before. You live in
the West, egg, she remarked, contemptuously. I know somebody there.
I don't know a single You must know Gatsby. Gatsby, demanded Daisy,
what Gatsby? Before I could reply that he was my neighbor, dinner was
announced, wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine, Tom Buchanan compelled me from
the room as though he were moving a checker to another square, slenderly,
languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips, the two young women preceded
us out onto the rosy colored porch opened toward the sunset, where four candles
flickered on the table in the diminished wind. Why candles, objected Daisy,
frowning, she snapped them out with her fingers. In two weeks, it'll
be the longest day in the year, She looked at us all radiantly.
Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it?
I always watch for 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 odd expression on her
little finger look. She complained, I heard 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 kitting hulking, insisted Daisy. Sometimes she and Miss
Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering in consequence 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. You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy, I confessed,
on my second glass of corky but rather impressive, Claret, Can you talk
about crops or something? I meant nothing in particular by this remark, but
it was taken up in an unexpected way. Civilization's going to pieces, broke
out Tom violently. I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have
you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard? Why no,
I answered, rather surprised by his tone. Well, it's a fine
book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is, if we
don't look out, the white race will be utterly submerged. It's all signed
typic stuff. It's been proved. Tom's getting very profound, said Daisy,
with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. He reads deep books with long words in
them. What was that word? We will? These books are all scientific,
insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. This fellow has worked out the
whole thing. It's up to us, who are the dominant race, to
watch out, or these other races will have control of things. We've got
to beat them down, whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.
You ought to live in California, began Miss Baker, but Tom interrupted her
by shifting heavily in his chair. This idea is that were Nordics. I
am, and you are, and you are. And after an infinitesimal hesitation,
he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again.
And we've produced all the things that go to make civilization old, 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 anymore. When almost immediately the telephone rang inside and the
butler left the porch, Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned towards me.
I'll tell you a little family's secret, she whispered, enthusiastically. It's
about the butler's nose. Do you want to hear about the butler's nose.
Well, that's why I came over tonight. 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 a romantic affection upon her glowing face. Her
voice held me forward breathlessly as I listened. Then the glow faded, each
light, deserting her with a 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 glowing and singing, I love to see you at my
table. Nick, you remind me of a rose, an absolute rose,
doesn't he? She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation, an absolute rose.
This was untrue. I'm not even faintly like a rose. She was only
extemporizing, but a stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was
trying to come out to you, concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling
words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and excused herself and
went into the house. Miss and I exchanged a short glance, consciously devoid
of meaning. I was about to speak, when she sat up alertly and
said shi in a warning voice. A subdued, impassioned murmur was audible in
the room beyond, and Miss Baker leaned forward, unashamed, trying to hear
the murmur, trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly,
and then ceased altogether. Now this, mister Gadsby, you spoke of
as my neighbor. I began, don't talk. I want to hear what
happens. Is something happening? I inquired, innocently. You mean to say
you don't know, said Miss Baker, honestly, surprised. I thought everybody
knew. I don't why, she said hesitantly, Tom's got some woman in
New York got some woman, I repeated blankly. 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 everyone and yet
to avoid all eyes. Couldn't guess what Tom and Daisy were thinking. But
I doubt if even Miss Baker, who seemed to have mastered a certain hearty
skepticism, was able to utterly 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. The horses, needless
to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss Baker, with several
feet of twilight between them, strolled back into the library as if to a
vigil, beside a perfectly tangible body, while trying to look pleasantly interested in
a little deaf I followed Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch
in front, in its deep gloom, we sat down side by side on
a wicker settee. Daisy took her face in her hands, as if feeling
its lovely shape, and her eyes moved gradually out to the velvet dusk.
I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would
be some sedative question about her a little girl. We don't know each other
very well, Nick, she said suddenly, even if we are cousins,
you didn't come to my wedding. I wasn't back from the war. That's
true, she hesitated. Well, I've had a very bad time, Nick,
and I'm pretty cynical about everything. Evidently she had reason to be.
I waited, but she didn't say anymore, and after a moment I returned
rather feebly to the subject of her daughter. I suppose she talks and eats
and everything. Oh yes, she looked at me absently. Listen, Nick,
let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you
like to hear very much? It'll show you I've gotten to feel about things.
Well, she was less than an hour old, and Tom was god
knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly 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
seeing 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 belong. 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 lamplight, bright on
his boots and dull on the autumn leaf. Yellow of her hair glinted along
the paper as she turned the page with a flutter of slender muscles in her
arms. When we came in, she held as silent for a moment,
with a lifted hand. To be continued, she said, tossing the magazine
on the table in our very next issue. Her body asserted itself with a
restless movement of her knee, and she stood up. Ten o'clock, she
remarked, apparently finding the time on the ceiling. Time for this good girl
to go to bed. Jordan's going to play in the tournament tomorrow, explained
Daisy over at Westchester, Oh, your Jordan Baker. I knew now why
her face was familiar. It's pleasing, contemptuous expression had looked out at me
for many a rhodogravier pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and
Palm Beach. I had heard some story of her, too, a critical,
unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long ago. Good
Night, she said, softly, wake me at eight, won't you?
If you'll get up, I will. Good Night, mister caraway see you
Anon. Of course you will, confirmed Daisy. In fact, I think
I'll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I'll sort of
oh fling you together, you know, lock you up accidentally in linen closets
and push you out to sea in a boat and all that sort of thing.
Good night, called miss Baker from the stairs. I haven't heard a
word. She's a nice girl, said Tom, after a moment. They
oughtn't to let her run around 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 weekends 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
Verandah, 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 the 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. That's right, corroborated Tom. We heard that
you were engaged. It's a libel. I'm too poor, but we heard
it, insisted Daisy, surprising me by opening up again in a flower like
way. We heard it from three people, so it must be true.
Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn't even vaguely
engaged. The fact that Gossip had published the bands was one of the reasons
I had come east. You can't stop going with an old friend on account
of rumors. And on the other hand, I had no intention of being
rumored into marriage. Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely rich.
Nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away.
It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out
of the house child in arms, But apparently there were no such intentions in
her head. As for Tom, the fact that he had some woman in
New York was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book.
Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale, I'd he is,
as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart. Already
it was deep summer on road house roofs and in front of wayside garages,
where new red petrol pumps sat out in pools of light. And when I
reached my estate at West Egg, I ran the car under its shed and
sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind
had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in
the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew
the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the
moonlight, and turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was
not alone. Fifty 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 mister 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 for 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. End
of Chapter one