The Great Gatsby 8

 

THE GREAT GATSBY

 

PART 8

 

Chapter 8

 

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. 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

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 much the same stratum 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.

"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 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 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?"

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 that 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 drive had been crowded with the

faces of those who 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.

"Goodbye," I called. "I enjoyed breakfast, Gatsby."

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 long distance from Detroit. Taking out my

time-table 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 ashheaps on the train that morning I had crossed

deliberately to the other side of the car. I suppose there'd 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 inside. 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 his groaning voice. Michaelis made a clumsy attempt

to distract him.

"How long have you been married, George? Come on there, try and sit

still a minute and answer my question. How long have you been married?"

"Twelve years."

"Ever had any children? Come on, George, sit still--I asked you a

question. Did you ever have any children?"

The hard brown beetles 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 work bench 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 any."

"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 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 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 strain to you

and you don't know what you're saying. You'd better try and sit quiet

till morning."

"He murdered 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 fellas and I

don't think any harm to NObody, but when I get to know a 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 Mrs. Wilson had been

running away from her husband, rather than trying to stop any

particular car.

"How could she of been like that?"

"She's a deep one," said Wilson, as if that answered the question.

"Ah-h-h----"

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

realized 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 ashheaps, where small grey

clouds took on fantastic shape 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 Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the

eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg which had just emerged pale and enormous

from the dissolving night.

"God sees everything," repeated Wilson.

"That's an advertisement," 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 night before

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 thereabouts 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, surer 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 any one 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 pump it up.

Then he gave instructions that the open 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 any one 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 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. 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 Wolfshiem's protégés--heard the

shots--afterward he could only say that he hadn't thought anything much

about them. I drove from the station directly to Gatsby's house and my

rushing anxiously up the front steps was the first thing that alarmed any

one. 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 compass, a thin red circle

in the water.

It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener

saw Wilson's body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was

complete.

To be concluded

 

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