More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
So the whole caravansary had fallen in like a card house at the disapproval in her eyes.
The next day was broiling, almost the last, certainly the warmest, of the summer.
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 everyone near by, including the woman, suspected me just the same.
Daisy and Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols weighing down their own white dresses against the singing breeze of the fans.
Afterward he kept looking at the child with surprise. I don’t think he had ever really believed in its existence before.
“You dream, you. You absolute little dream.”
“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.
Gatsby’s eyes followed it momentarily; he raised his hand and pointed across the bay. “I’m right across from you.” “So you are.”
“What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon?” cried Daisy, “and the day after that, and the next thirty years?”
“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw.
It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it… High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl…
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.
His wife and his mistress, until an hour ago secure and inviolate, were slipping precipitately from his control.
“It was an opportunity they gave to some of the officers after the armistice,” he continued. “We could go to any of the universities in England or France.” I wanted to get up and slap him on the back. I had one of those renewals of complete faith in him that I’d experienced before.
Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.
At this point Jordan and I tried to go, but Tom and Gatsby insisted with competitive firmness that we remain—as though neither of them had anything to conceal and it would be a privilege to partake vicariously of their emotions.
Her eyes fell on Jordan and me with a sort of appeal, as though she realized at last what she was doing—and as though she had never, all along, intended doing anything at all.
That unfamiliar yet recognizable look was back again in Gatsby’s face.
Her frightened eyes told that whatever intentions, whatever courage she had had, were definitely gone.
But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age.
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.
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.
I disliked him so much by this time that I didn’t find it necessary to tell him he was wrong.
Crossing the porch where we had dined that June night three months before, I came to a small rectangle of light which I guessed was the pantry window.
They weren’t happy, and neither of them 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
She vanished into her rich house, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby—nothing.
She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her…
What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?”
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.
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.
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.
He left feeling that if he had searched harder, he might have found her—that he was leaving her behind.
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.”
I wasn’t worth a decent stroke of work, but it was more than that—I didn’t want to leave Gatsby.
“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 that radiant and understanding smile, as if we’d been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all the time.
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.
We talked like that for a while, and then abruptly we weren’t talking any longer.
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.
“You ought to have a church, George, for times like this. You must have gone to church once.
Then for three hours he disappeared from view.
On the other hand, no garage man who had seen him ever came forward, and perhaps he had an easier, surer way of finding out what he wanted to know.
If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, 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 a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.
From the moment I telephoned news of the catastrophe to West Egg village, every surmise about him, and every practical question, was referred to me. At first I was surprised and confused; then, as he lay in his house and didn’t move or breathe or speak, hour upon hour, it grew upon me that I was responsible, because no one else was interested—interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which everyone has some vague right at the end.
When the butler brought back Wolfshiem’s answer I began to have a feeling of defiance, of scornful solidarity between Gatsby and me against them all.
