* No wasting time at Shafters or [a name, indecipherable]
* No more smokeing or chewing.
* Bath every other day
* Read one improving book or magazine per week
* Save $5.00 [crossed out] $3.00 per week
* Be better to parents
“I came across this book by accident,” said the old man. “It just
shows you, don’t it?”
“It just shows you.”
“Jimmy was bound to get ahead. He always had some resolves like this
or something. Do you notice what he’s got about improving his mind? He
was always great for that. He told me I et like a hog once, and I beat
him for it.”
He was reluctant to close the book, reading each item aloud and then
looking eagerly at me. I think he rather expected me to copy down the
list for my own use.
A little before three the Lutheran minister arrived from Flushing, and
I began to look involuntarily out the windows for other cars. So did
Gatsby’s father. And as the time passed and the servants came in and
stood waiting in the hall, his eyes began to blink anxiously, and he
spoke of the rain in a worried, uncertain way. The minister glanced
several times at his watch, so I took him aside and asked him to wait
for half an hour. But it wasn’t any use. Nobody came.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
About five o’clock our procession of three cars reached the cemetery
and stopped in a thick drizzle beside the gate—first a motor hearse,
horribly black and wet, then Mr. Gatz and the minister and me in the
limousine, and a little later four or five servants and the postman
from West Egg, in Gatsby’s station wagon, all wet to the skin. As we
started through the gate into the cemetery I heard a car stop and then
the sound of someone splashing after us over the soggy ground. I
looked around. It was the man with owl-eyed glasses whom I had found
marvelling over Gatsby’s books in the library one night three months
before.
I’d never seen him since then. I don’t know how he knew about the
funeral, or even his name. The rain poured down his thick glasses, and
he took them off and wiped them to see the protecting canvas unrolled
from Gatsby’s grave.
I tried to think about Gatsby then for a moment, but he was already
too far away, and I could only remember, without resentment, that
Daisy hadn’t sent a message or a flower. Dimly I heard someone murmur
“Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on,” and then the owl-eyed
man said “Amen to that,” in a brave voice.
We straggled down quickly through the rain to the cars. Owl-eyes spoke
to me by the gate.
“I couldn’t get to the house,” he remarked.
“Neither could anybody else.”
“Go on!” He started. “Why, my God! they used to go there by the
hundreds.”
He took off his glasses and wiped them again, outside and in.
“The poor son-of-a-bitch,” he said.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school
and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than
Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o’clock of a
December evening, with a few Chicago friends, already caught up into
their own holiday gaieties, to bid them a hasty goodbye. I remember
the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-That’s and the
chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught
sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: “Are you
going to the Ordways’? the Herseys’? the Schultzes’?” and the long
green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky
yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad looking
cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.
When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow,
began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and
the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild
brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we
walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware
of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we
melted indistinguishably into it again.
That’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede
towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street
lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly
wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a
little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent
from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are
still called through decades by a family’s name. I see now that this
has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and
Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some
deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.
Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware
of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the
Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the
children and the very old—even then it had always for me a quality of
distortion. West Egg, especially, still figures in my more fantastic
dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at
once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging
sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress
suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a
drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over
the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a
house—the wrong house. But no one knows the woman’s name, and no one
cares.
After Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted
beyond my eyes’ power of correction. So when the blue smoke of brittle
leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the
line I decided to come back home.
There was one thing to be done before I left, an awkward, unpleasant
thing that perhaps had better have been let alone. But I wanted to
leave things in order and not just trust that obliging and indifferent
sea to sweep my refuse away. I saw Jordan Baker and talked over and
around what had happened to us together, and what had happened
afterward to me, and she lay perfectly still, listening, in a big
chair.
She was dressed to play golf, and I remember thinking she looked like
a good illustration, her chin raised a little jauntily, her hair the
colour of an autumn leaf, her face the same brown tint as the
fingerless glove on her knee. When I had finished she told me without
comment that she was engaged to another man. I doubted that, though
there were several she could have married at a nod of her head, but I
pretended to be surprised. For just a minute I wondered if I wasn’t
making a mistake, then I thought it all over again quickly and got up
to say goodbye.
“Nevertheless you did throw me over,” said Jordan suddenly. “You threw
me over on the telephone. I don’t give a damn about you now, but it
was a new experience for me, and I felt a little dizzy for a while.”
We shook hands.
“Oh, and do you remember”—she added—“a conversation we had once about
driving a car?”
“Why—not exactly.”
“You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver?
Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me
to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest,
straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.”
“I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and
call it honour.”
She didn’t answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously
sorry, I turned away.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
One afternoon late in October I saw Tom Buchanan. He was walking ahead
of me along Fifth Avenue in his alert, aggressive way, his hands out a
little from his body as if to fight off interference, his head moving
sharply here and there, adapting itself to his restless eyes. Just as
I slowed up to avoid overtaking him he stopped and began frowning into
the windows of a jewellery store. Suddenly he saw me and walked back,
holding out his hand.
“What’s the matter, Nick? Do you object to shaking hands with me?”
“Yes. You know what I think of you.”
“You’re crazy, Nick,” he said quickly. “Crazy as hell. I don’t know
what’s the matter with you.”
“Tom,” I inquired, “what did you say to Wilson that afternoon?”
He stared at me without a word, and I knew I had guessed right about
those missing hours. I started to turn away, but he took a step after
me and grabbed my arm.
“I told him the truth,” he said. “He came to the door while we were
getting ready to leave, and when I sent down word that we weren’t in
he tried to force his way upstairs. He was crazy enough to kill me if
I hadn’t told him who owned the car. His hand was on a revolver in his
pocket every minute he was in the house—” He broke off defiantly.
“What if I did tell him? That fellow had it coming to him. He threw
dust into your eyes just like he did in Daisy’s, but he was a tough
one. He ran over Myrtle like you’d run over a dog and never even
stopped his car.”
There was nothing I could say, except the one unutterable fact that it
wasn’t true.
“And if you think I didn’t have my share of suffering—look here, when
I went to give up that flat and saw that damn box of dog biscuits
sitting there on the sideboard, I sat down and cried like a baby. By
God it was awful—”
I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done
was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and
confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up
things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their
vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let
other people clean up the mess they had made …
I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as
though I were talking to a child. Then he went into the jewellery
store to buy a pearl necklace—or perhaps only a pair of cuff
buttons—rid of my provincial squeamishness forever.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gatsby’s house was still empty when I left—the grass on his lawn had
grown as long as mine. One of the taxi drivers in the village never
took a fare past the entrance gate without stopping for a minute and
pointing inside; perhaps it was he who drove Daisy and Gatsby over to
East Egg the night of the accident, and perhaps he had made a story
about it all his own. I didn’t want to hear it and I avoided him when
I got off the train.
I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming,
dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still
hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant, from his garden,
and the cars going up and down his drive. One night I did hear a
material car there, and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I
didn’t investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away
at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over.
On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer,
I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once
more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a
piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it,
drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the
beach and sprawled out on the sand.
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any
lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the
Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to
melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that
flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new
world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s
house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all
human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his
breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic
contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the
last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for
wonder.
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of
Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of
Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream
must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He
did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that
vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic
rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by
year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no
matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further … And
one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into
the past.