Chapter eight of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. 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. Towards 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, and I waited, and about four
o'clock she came to the window and stood there for a minute, and then
turned out the light. His house had never seemed so enormous to me as
it did that night. When we hunted through the great rooms for cigarettes,
we pushed aside curtains that were like pavilions, and felt over innumerable feet of
dark wall for electric light switches. Once I tumbled with a sort of splash
upon the keys of a ghostly piano, there was an inexplicable amount of dust
everywhere, and the rooms were musty, as though they hadn't been aired for
many days. I found the humidor on an unfamiliar table with two stale dry
cigarettes inside. Throwing open the French windows of the drawing room, we sat
smoking out into the darkness. You want to go away, I said,
it's pretty certain they'll trace your car. Go away now old Sport, go
to Atlantic City for a week, or up to Montreal. He wouldn't consider
it. He couldn't possibly leave Daisy until he knew what she was going to
do. He was clutching at some last hope, and I couldn't bear to
shake him free. It was this night that he told me the strange story
of his youth with Dan Cody told it to me because Jay Gatsby had broken
up like glass against Tom's hard malice, and the long secret extravaganza was played
out. I think he would have acknowledged anything now without reserve. But he
wanted to talk about Daisy. She was the first nice girl he had ever
known. In various unrevealed capacities, he had come in contact with such people,
but 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 upstairs, 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 and lavender, but fresh and breathing and redolent, of this
year's shy ding 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 such the same strata 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 families standing behind him, and he
was liable, at the whim of an impersonal government, to be blown anywhere
about the world. But he didn't despise himself, and it didn't turn out
as he imagined. He had intended, probably to take what he could and
go, But now he found that he had committed himself to the following of
a grail. He knew that Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn't realize just
how extraordinary a nice girl could be. She vanished into her rich house,
into her rich, fool life, leaving Gatsby nothing. He felt married to
her, that was all. When they met again two days later, it
was Gatsby who was breathless, who was somehow betrayed. Her porch was bright
with the bought luxury of starshine. The wicker of the settee squeaked fashionably as
it turned toward him, and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth. She
had caught a cold and made her voice huskier and more charming than ever,
And Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves,
of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy gleaming like silver,
safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor. I can't describe to
you how surprised I was to find out I loved her old sport. I
even hoped for a while that she'd throw me over, but she didn't because
she was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot because
I knew different things from her. Well, there, I was way off
my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden
I didn't care. What was the use of doing great things if I could
have a better time telling her what I was going to do. On the
last afternoon before he went abroad, he sat with Daisy in his arms for
a long, silent time. It was a cold fall day, the fire
in the room, and her cheeks flushed now and then she moved, and
she changed his arm a little, and once he kissed her dark shining hair.
The afternoon had made them tranquil for a while, as if to give
them a deep memory of the long parting. The next day promised they had
never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with
another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat's shoulder, or when
he touched the end of her fingers gently, as though they were asleep.
He did extraordinarily well in the war. He was a captain before he went
to the front, and following the Argon battles he got his majority in the
command of the divisional machine guns. After the armistice, he tried frantically to
get home, but some complication or misunderstanding sent him to Oxford instead. He
was worried. Now there was a quality of nervous despair in Daisy's letters.
She didn't see why he couldn't come. She was feeling the pressure of the
world outside, and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her,
and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all. For
Daisy was young, and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant,
cheerful snobbery and orchestras, which set the rhythm of the year, summing up
the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes. All night, the saxophones
wailed the hopeless comment of the Beale Street Blues, while a hundred pairs of
golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust at the gray tea hour. There
were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh
faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the
floor. Through this twilight universe, Daisy began to move again with the season.
Suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a
dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn, with the beads and chiffon of
an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed, and
all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her
life shaped now, immediately, and the decision must be made by some force
of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality that was close at hand.
That force took shape in the middle of spring with the arrival of Tom Buchanan.
There was a wholesome bulkiness about his person and his position, and Daisy
was flattered. Doubtless there was a certain struggle and a certain relief. The
letter reached Gatsby while he was at Oxford. It was dawned now on Long
Island, and we went about opening the rest of the windows downstairs, filling
the house with gray turning gold turning light. The shadow of a tree fell
abruptly across the dew, and ghostly birds began to sing among the blue leaves.
There was a slow, pleasant movement in the air, scarcely a wind,
promising a cool, lovely day. I don't think she ever loved him.
Gatsby turned around from a window and looked at me challengingly. You must
remember old sport. She was very excited this afternoon. He told her those
things in a way that frightened her, that made it look as if I
was some kind of cheap, sharper man. The result was she hardly knew
what she was saying. He sat down gloomily. And of course she might
have loved him just for a minute when they were first married, and loved
me even more than do you see. Suddenly he came out with curious remark.
In any case, he said, it was just personal. What could
you make of that except to suspect some intensity in his conception of the affair
that couldn't be measured. He came back from France when Tom and Daisy were
still on their wedding trip, and made a miserable but irresistible journey to Louisville
on the last of his army pay. He stayed there a week, walking
the streets where their footsteps had clicked together through the November night, and revisiting
the out of the way places to which they had driven in their white car.
Just as Daisy's house had always seemed to him more mysterious and gay than
other houses, so his idea of the city itself, even though she was
gone from it, was pervaded with this melancholy beauty. He left, feeling
that if he had searched harder, he might have found her. That he
was leaving her behind the day coach. He was penniless, now was hot.
He went out to the open vestibule and sat down on a folding chair,
and the station slid away, and the backs of unfamiliar buildings moved by,
then out into the spring fields, where a yellow trolley raced them for
a minute, with people in it who might once have seen the pale magic
of her face. Along the casual street, the track curved, and now
it was going away from the sun, which, as it sank lower,
seemed to spread itself in benediction over the vanishing city where she had drawn her
breath. He stretched out his hand desperately, as if to snatch only a
wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made
lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his
blurred eyes, and he knew that he had lost that part of it,
the freshest and the best forever. It was nine o'clock when We finished breakfast
and went out on the porch. The night had made a sharp difference in
the weather, and there was an autumn flavor in the air. The gardener,
the last one of Gatsby's former servants, came to the foot of the
steps. I'm going to train the pool today, mister Gadsby leaves us stop
falling pretty soon, and there's always trouble with the pipes. Don't do it
today, Gatsby answered. He turned to me apologetically. You know, old
Sport. I've never used that pool all summer. I looked at my watch
and stood up. Twelve minutes to my train. I didn't want to go
to the city. I wasn't worth a decent stroke of work. But it
was more than that. I didn't want to leave Gatsby. I missed that
train and then another before I could get myself away. I'll call you up,
I said, finally, do old Sport. I'll call you about noon.
We walked slowly down the steps. I suppose Daisy'll call too. He
looked at me anxiously, as if he hoped I'd corroborate this. I suppose
so well. Goodbye. We shook hands and I started away, just before
I reached the hedge, I remembered something and turned around. They're a rotten
crowd, I shouted across the lawn. You're worth the whole damn bunch put
together. I've always been glad. I said that it was the only compliment
I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end.
First he nodded politely, and then his face broke into a radiant and understanding
smile, as if we'd been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all the time.
His gorgeous pink rag of a suit made a bright spot of color against
the white steps. And I thought of the night when I first came to
his ancestral home three months before the lawn, and the drive had been crowded
with the faces of those who had guessed at his corruption, and he had
stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream as he waved them goodbye.
I thanked him for his hospitality. We were always thanking him for that.
I and the others good bye, I called. I enjoyed breakfast Gadsby up
in the city. I tried for a while to list the quotations on an
interminable amount of stock. Then I fell asleep in my swivel chair. Just
before noon. The phone woke me and I started up with sweat breaking out
on my forehead. It was Jordan Baker. She often called me up at
this hour because the uncertainty of her own movements between hotels and clubs and private
houses made her hard to find in any other way. Usually her voice came
over the wire as something fresh and cool, as if a divot from a
green golf links had come sailing in at the office window. But this morning
it seemed harsh and dry. I've left Daisy's house, she said. I'm
at Hempstead and I'm going down to Southampton this afternoon. Probably it had been
tactful to leave Daisy's house, but the act annoyed me, and her next
remark made me rigid. You weren't so nice to me last night. How
could it have mattered? Then silence for a moment. Then, however,
I want to see you. I want to see you too. Suppose I
don't go to Southampton and come into town this afternoon. No, I don't
think this afternoon very well, It's impossible this afternoon various. We talked like
that for a while and then abruptly we weren't talking any longer. I don't
know which of us hung up with a sharp click, but I know I
didn't care. I couldn't have talked to her across a tea table that day
if I never talked to her again in this world. I called Gatsby's house
a few minutes later, but the line was busy. I tried four times.
Finally, an exasperated central told me the wire was being kept open for
a long distance from Detroit. Taking out my timetable, I drew a small
circle around the three fifty train. Then I leaned back in my chair and
tried to think. It was just noon when I passed the ash heaps on
the train. That morning, I had crossed deliberately to the other side of
the car. I supposed there would be a curious crowd around there all day,
with little boys searching for dark spots in the dust, and some garrulous
man telling over and over what had happened, until it became less and less
real even to him, and he could tell it no longer, and Myrtle
Wilson's tragic achievement was forgotten. Now I want to go back a little and
tell what happened at the garage after we left there the night before. They
had difficulty in locating the sister Catherine. She must have broken her rule against
drinking that night, for when she arrived she was stupid with liquor and unable
to understand that the ambulance had already gone to Flushing. When they convinced her
of this, she immediately fainted, as if that was the intolerable part of
the affair. Someone kind or curious took her in his car and drove her
in the wake of her sister's body until long after midnight. A changing crowd
lapped up against the front of the garage while George Wilson rocked himself back and
forth on the couch and side. For a while, the door of the
office was open, and everyone who came into the garage glanced irresistibly through it.
Finally, someone said it was a shame and closed the door. Michaelis
and several other men were with him first, four or five men later,
two or three men still later. Michaelis had to ask the last stranger to
wait there fifteen minutes longer while he went back to his own place and made
a pot of coffee. After that he stayed there alone with Wilson until dawn.
About three o'clock, the quality of Wilson's incoherent muttering changed. He grew
quieter and began to talk about the yellow car. He announced that he had
a way of finding out whom the yellow car belonged to, And then he
blurted out that a couple of months ago his wife had come from the city
with her face bruised and her nose swollen. But when he heard himself say
this, he flinched and began to cry, Oh my God. Again in
this groaning voice, Michaelis made a clumsy attempt to distract him. How long
have you been married, George? Come on there and try to sit a
minute and answer my question. How long have you been married? Twelve years?
Ever had any children? Come on, George, sit still, I
ask you a question, did you ever have any children? The hard browned
beadles kept thudding against the dull light, and whenever Michaelis heard a car go
tearing along the road outside, it sounded to him like the car that hadn't
stopped a few hours before. He didn't like to go into the garage because
the workbench was stained where the body had been lying, so he moved uncomfortably
around the office. He knew every object in it before morning, and from
time to time sat down beside Wilson, trying to keep him more quiet.
Have you got a church you go to sometimes, George? Maybe even if
you haven't been there for a long time, maybe I could call up the
church and get a priest to come over and he could talk to you.
See, don't belong to Annie. You ought to have a church, George,
for times like this. You must have gone to church once. Didn't
you get married in a church? Listen, George, listen to me.
Didn't you get married in a church? That was a long time ago.
The effort of answering broke the rhythm of his rocking. For a moment he
was silent. Then the same half knowing, half bewildered look came back into
his faded eyes. Look in the drawer there, he said, pointing at
the desk. Which drawer, that drawer, that one. Michaelis opened the
drawer and nearest his hand. There was nothing in it but a small,
expensive dog leash made of leather and braided silver. It was apparently new,
this, he inquired, holding it up Wilson stared and nodded. I found
it yesterday afternoon. She tried to tell me about it, but I knew
it. There was something funny. You mean your wife bought it. She
had it wrapped in tissue paper on her bureau. Michaelis didn't see anything odd
in that, and he gave Wilson a dozen reasons why his wife might have
bought the dog leash. But conceivably Wilson had heard some of these same explanations
before from Myrtle. Because he began saying, oh my God again in a
whisper. His comforter left several explanations in the air. Then he killed her,
said Wilson. His mouth dropped open suddenly. Who did I have a
way of finding out? You're morbid? George said his friend. This has
been a strained to you, and you don't know what you're saying. You
better try and sit quiet till morning. He mighted her it was an accident.
George Wilson shook his head, his eyes narrowed, and his mouth widened
slightly with the ghost of a superior Hm, I know, he said,
definitely, I'm one of these trusting fellows, and I don't think any harm
to nobody. But when I get to know ah thing, I know it.
It was the man in that car. She ran out to speak to
him and he wouldn't stop. Michaelis had seen this too, but it hadn't
occurred to him that there was any special significance in it. He believed that
missus Wilson had been running away from her husband rather than trying to stop any
particular car. How could she have been like that? She's a deep one,
said Wilson, as if that answered the question. Ah. He began
to rock again, and Michaelis stood, twisting the leash in his hand.
Maybe you got some friend that I could telephone for George. This was a
forlorn hope. He was almost sure that Wilson had no friend. There was
not enough of him for his wife. He was glad a little later when
he noticed a change in the room, a blue quickening by the window,
and eyes that dawn wasn't far off. About five o'clock, it was blue
enough outside to snap off the light. Wilson's glazed eyes turned out to the
ash heaps, where small gray clouds took on fantastic shapes and scurried here and
there in the faint dawn wind. I spoke to her, he muttered,
after a long silence, I told her she might fool me, but she
couldn't fool God. I took her to the window with an effort. He
got up and walked to the rear window and leaned with his face pressed against
it, and I said, God knows what you've been doing, everything you've
been doing. You may fool me, but you can't fool God. Standing
behind him, michael Is saw with a shock that he was looking at the
eyes of doctor t. J Eckelberg, which had just emerged, pale and
enormous from the dissolving night. God sees everything, repeated Wilson. That's an
advertised Michaelis assured him. Something made him turn away from the window and look
back into the room, But Wilson stood there a long time, his face
close to the window pane, nodding into the twilight. By six o'clock,
Michaelis was worn out and grateful for the sound of a car stopping outside.
It was one of the watchers of the ninety four who had promised to come
back, so he cooked breakfast for three, which he and the other man
ate together. Wilson was quieter now, and Michaelis went home to sleep.
When he awoke four hours later and hurried back to the garage, Wilson was
gone. His movements, he was on foot all the time, were afterward
traced to Port Roosevelt and then to Gad's Hill, where he bought a sandwich
that he didn't eat and a cup of coffee. He must have been tired
and walking slowly, for he didn't reach Gad's Hill until noon. Thus far
there was no difficulty in accounting for his time. There were boys who had
seen a man acting sort of crazy, and motorists at whom he stared oddly
from the side of the road. Then for three hours he disappeared from view.
The police, on the strength of what he said to Michaelis that he
had a way of finding out, supposed that he spent that time going from
garage to garage thereabout inquiring for a yellow car. On the other hand,
no garage man who had seen him ever came forward, and perhaps he had
an easier sure way of finding out what he wanted to know. By half
past two he was in West Egg where he asked someone the way to Gatsby's
house. So by that time he knew Gatsby's name. At two o'clock,
Gatsby put on his bathing suit and left word with the butler that if anyone
phoned, word was to be brought to him at the pool. He stopped
at the garage for a pneumatic mattress that had amused his guests during the summer,
and the chauffeur helped him to pump it up. Then he gave instructions
that the and car wasn't to be taken out under any circumstances, and this
was strange because the front right fender needed repair. Gatsby shouldered the mattress and
started for the pool. Once he stopped and shifted it a little, and
the chauffeur asked him if he needed help, but he shook his head and
in a moment disappeared among the yellowing trees. No telephone message arrived, but
the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o'clock, until
long after there was anyone to give it to if it came. I have
an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps he no
longer cared. If that was true, he must have felt that he had
lost the old world charm and paid a high price for living too long with
a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening
leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing arose is and how raw
the sunlight was upon this scarcely created grass, a new world, material without
being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about
like that ashen fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees. The chauffeur,
he was one of Wolfsheim's protegees, heard the shots. Afterwards, he
could only say that he hadn't thought anything much about them. I drove from
the station directly to Gadsby's house, and my rushing anxiously up the front steps
was the first thing that alarmed anyone, But they knew then, I firmly
believe, With scarcely a word, said four of us, the chauffeur,
butler, gardener, and I hurried down to the pool. There was a
faint, barely perceptible movement of the water as the fresh flow from one end
urged its way toward the drain at the other, with little ripples that were
hardly the shadows of waves. The laden mattress moved irregularly down the pool.
A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its
accidental course. With its accidental burden, the touch of a cluster of leaves
revolved it, slowly, tracing like the leg of transit, a thin red
circle in the water. It was after we started with gats be toward the
house that the gardener saw Wilson's body a little way off in the grass,
and the holocaust was complete. End of Chapter eight