I couldn’t sleep all night; a foghorn 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 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 ought 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 that 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
in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year’s
shining motorcars 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 pretences. 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 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 family 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 had
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, full 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 star-shine; the wicker of the settee squeaked fashionably as
she turned toward him and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth. She
had caught a cold, and it 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.
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“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, with fire in the
room and her cheeks flushed. Now and then she moved and he 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
for 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 she were
asleep.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
He did extraordinarily well in the war. He was a captain before he
went to the front, and following the Argonne battles he got his
majority and 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 grey 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
still at Oxford.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
It was dawn now on Long Island and we went about opening the rest of
the windows downstairs, filling the house with grey-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. And the result was she hardly knew what she was saying.”
He sat down gloomily.
“Of course she might have loved him just for a minute, when they were
first married—and loved me more even then, do you see?”
Suddenly he came out with a 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 her 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 a 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 flavour in the air. The gardener, the last one of
Gatsby’s former servants, came to the foot of the steps.
“I’m going to drain the pool today, Mr. Gatsby. Leaves’ll start
falling pretty soon, and then 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?”