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        F.Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby

     Chapter 1 In my  younger and  more  vulnerable years my father  gave me
some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you
feel  like criticizing any one,"  he told  me, "just  remember  that all the
people in this world haven't  had the advantages that you've had." He didn't
say  any more, but we've  always been unusually communicative in  a reserved
way,  and  I  understood that  he meant a  great  deal  more than  that.  In
consequence, I'm inclined to reserve  all judgments, a habit that has opened
up many  curious natures to me and also  made  me the victim  of  not  a few
veteran bores.  The abnormal mind is  quick to  detect and  attach itself to
this quality  when it appears in a normal person, and so it  came about that
in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy
to the  secret  griefs of wild,  unknown men.  Most of the  confidences were
unsought--frequently  I have  feigned  sleep,  preoccupation,  or a  hostile
levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation
was  quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or
at least the terms in which they express  them, are usually plagiaristic and
marred by  obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite
hope. I am still  a little afraid of  missing something if I forget that, as
my  father snobbishly  suggested, and I  snobbishly repeat, a  sense  of the
fundamental  decencies  is  parcelled  out  unequally  at birth. And,  after
boasting this way  of  my tolerance, I come to the  admission that it has  a
limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after
a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the
East last  autumn I felt that I  wanted the  world to be in uniform and at a
sort of moral attention forever;  I wanted no  more  riotous excursions with
privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his
name  to this  book,  was  exempt from my reaction--Gatsby,  who represented
everything  for  which  I  have an unaffected scorn.  If  personality  is an
unbroken  series of  successful gestures, then there  was something gorgeous
about him, some  heightened  sensitivity  to the promises of life, as  if he
were related  to one  of  those intricate machines that register earthquakes
ten  thousand miles  away. This responsiveness  had nothing to do with  that
flabby impressionability  which is dignified under the name of the "creative
temperament."--it  was an extraordinary gift for hope, a  romantic readiness
such as I have never found in any other person and which  it is not likely I
shall ever  find  again.  No--Gatsby turned out all right at the  end; it is
what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that
temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows  and short-winded
elations of men.  My  family have been prominent,  well-to-do people in this
Middle Western city for  three generations. The Carraways are something of a
clan,  and  we have  a tradition  that  we're  descended from  the  Dukes of
Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was  my grandfather's  brother,
who  came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started
the  wholesale hardware business  that  my father carries on to-day. I never
saw  this  great-uncle,  but  I'm  supposed  to  look like him--with special
reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father's office I
graduated  from New Haven in 1915, just a  quarter  of  a  century after  my
father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration
known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came
back restless. Instead  of  being the warm centre of the world,  the  Middle
West  now  seemed  like the ragged edge of the  universe--so I decided to go
East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business,
so  I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles
talked it over as if  they were choosing a  prep school for  me, and finally
said,  "Why--ye--es,"  with very grave,  hesitant  faces.  Father agreed  to
finance me  for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I
thought, in the spring  of twenty-two. The practical thing was to find rooms
in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide
lawns and friendly trees, so when a  young man  at the office suggested that
we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like  a great idea.
He found the  house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow  at eighty a month,
but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to
the country  alone. I had a dog--at least I had him for a few days until  he
ran away--and  an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who  made my bed and cooked
breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove. It
was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived
than I, stopped me on the road.  "How do  you get  to West Egg  village?" he
asked  helplessly. I told him. And as I walked on I was  lonely no longer. I
was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on
me the freedom of the neighborhood. And so  with the sunshine and  the great
bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I
had  that familiar  conviction that  life was beginning  over again with the
summer. There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to
be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a  dozen volumes
on banking and credit and investment securities, and  they stood on my shelf
in red and gold  like new  money  from  the mint,  promising to  unfold  the
shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And  I had the
high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in
college--one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for
the "Yale News."--and now I was going to bring back  all such things into my
life  and   become  again   that  most  limited  of   all  specialists,  the
"well-rounded  man."  This  isn't  just  an   epigram--life   is  much  more
successfully looked at from a single window, after  all. It was a matter  of
chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities
in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself
due east of New  York--and where there are, among other natural curiosities,
two unusual  formations  of  land.  Twenty  miles  from  the city a pair  of
enormous eggs, identical in contour and  separated  only  by a courtesy bay,
jut  out into  the most domesticated  body  of  salt water  in  the  Western
hemisphere,  the  great  wet  barnyard  of Long  Island Sound. they  are not
perfect  ovals--like the  egg in  the Columbus story, they are both  crushed
flat at the contact end--but their  physical resemblance must be a source of
perpetual  confusion to the gulls that fly  overhead. to the wingless a more
arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape
and size. I lived at  West Egg, the--well, the less fashionable  of the two,
though  this is  a most superficial  tag to express  the bizarre and  not  a
little sinister contrast between them. my house was at  the  very tip of the
egg, only fifty yards from  the Sound,  and squeezed between two huge places
that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. the one on my right was
a colossal affair  by any standard--it was a factual imitation of some Hotel
de  Ville  in Normandy, with a tower  on one side, spanking new under a thin
beard  of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres  of
lawn and garden. it was Gatsby's mansion. Or, rather, as  I didn't know  Mr.
Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house
was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I
had a view  of the water, a  partial view of  my  neighbor's lawn,  and  the
consoling proximity of  millionaires--all for eighty dollars a month. Across
the courtesy bay the white  palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered  along
the water,  and  the history of  the summer really  begins on  the evening I
drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy  was my second
cousin once removed, and I'd  known Tom in college. And just after the war I
spent  two days with them  in Chicago. Her  husband, among various  physical
accomplishments,  had  been one  of the  most powerful ends that ever played
football  at  New  Haven--a national figure in a way, one  of those men  who
reach  such  an  acute  limited excellence  at  twenty-one  that  everything
afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy--even in
college his freedom with money was a matter for  reproach--but now he'd left
Chicago  and come East in a fashion that rather  took your breath  away: for
instance, he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. it was
hard to realize  that  a man in my own generation was  wealthy enough  to do
that. Why they came East I don't  know. They had spent  a year in France for
no particular reason, and then drifted here and  there  unrestfully wherever
people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent  move,  said
Daisy  over  the telephone,  but I didn't believe  it--I  had no sight  into
Daisy's heart, but  I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little
wistfully, for the dramatic  turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.
And so it happened that on a warm  windy evening I drove over to East Egg to
see two old friends  whom I scarcely knew at all.  Their house was even more
elaborate  than  I  expected,  a  cheerful red-and-white  Georgian  Colonial
mansion,  overlooking the bay. The lawn started  at the beach and ran toward
the  front door  for a quarter of a mile, jumping over  sun-dials  and brick
walks and burning gardens--finally when it reached the house drifting up the
side in  bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The  front was
broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide
open  to  the warm windy afternoon, and Tom  Buchanan  in riding clothes was
standing  with his legs apart on the front porch.  He had changed since  his
New  Haven  years.  Now he  was a sturdy straw-haired  man of  thirty with a
rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining  arrogant eyes  had
established  dominance over his face and  gave him the  appearance of always
leaning aggressively  forward. Not  even the effeminate swank of  his riding
clothes could hide  the enormous power of that body--he seemed to fill those
glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great
pack  of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was
a body  capable of  enormous leverage--a  cruel body.  His speaking voice, a
gruff husky tenor,  added to the impression  of fractiousness  he  conveyed.
There  was  a touch  of  paternal  contempt  in it, even  toward  people  he
liked--and there were men  at New Haven who had hated  his guts. "Now, don't
think my opinion on these matters is final," he seemed to say, "just because
I'm  stronger  and more of a  man than you are." We were in the  same senior
society,  and while we were  never intimate I always had the impression that
he  approved  of  me  and  wanted me to  like  him with some harsh,  defiant
wistfulness of his  own. We talked for  a few  minutes  on  the sunny porch.
"I've got a  nice place  here," he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.
Turning  me around by one arm, he  moved a  broad flat hand along the  front
vista, including in  its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep,
pungent roses, and  a  snub-nosed  motor-boat that bumped the tide offshore.
"It belonged to  Demaine, the  oil man." He turned me around again, politely
and abruptly.  "We'll go inside."  We walked through  a  high hallway into a
bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound  into the house by French windows
at either end. The windows  were ajar  and gleaming white  against the fresh
grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew
through  the  room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other  like pale
flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling,  and
then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on  it  as wind does
on  the  sea. The  only completely  stationary  object in the  room  was  an
enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed  up  as  though upon  an
anchored balloon. They were both  in white, and their  dresses were rippling
and fluttering as  if they had just been blown  back in after a short flight
around the house. I must have  stood for a few moments listening to the whip
and snap of the curtains and the  groan of a picture on the wall. Then there
was a boom  as Tom Buchanan  shut the rear windows  and the caught wind died
out about  the  room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two  young women
ballooned slowly to the floor. The younger of the two was a stranger to  me.
She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless,
and with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something  on it
which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me  out of the corner of her eyes
she  gave no hint  of it--indeed, I was  almost surprised into  murmuring an
apology  for having disturbed her by coming in. The other  girl, Daisy, made
an  attempt  to  rise--she  leaned  slightly  forward with  a  conscientious
expression--then  she  laughed,  an  absurd,  charming little laugh,  and  I
laughed  too  and  came  forward   into  the  room.  "I'm  p-paralyzed  with
happiness." She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held
my hand for a moment,  looking  up into my face, promising that there was no
one  in  the world she  so  much wanted  to see. That was a way she had. She
hinted in a  murmur that the surname  of the balancing girl was Baker. (I've
heard it said that Daisy's  murmur was only to make people lean toward  her;
an irrelevant  criticism  that made it no  less charming.) At any rate, Miss
Baker's  lips  fluttered,  she  nodded at me almost imperceptibly,  and then
quickly  tipped her  head  back  again--the  object  she  was balancing  had
obviously  tottered a  little and given her  something of a fright. Again  a
sort  of apology  arose  to  my  lips.  Almost  any  exhibition of  complete
self-sufficiency  draws a stunned  tribute  from me. I  looked  back  at  my
cousin, who began to ask  me  questions in her low, thrilling  voice. It was
the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if  each speech is an
arrangement of notes that will never be  played again.  Her face was sad and
lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a  bright passionate mouth,
but  there was  an excitement  in her  voice that men who had cared for  her
found difficult  to forget:  a singing compulsion, a  whispered  "Listen," a
promise that she had done gay, exciting  things just a while  since and that
there were gay, exciting things  hovering in the next hour. I told her how I
had stopped off in Chicago for a day on  my way East, and how a dozen people
had  sent their  love through me. "Do they miss me?" she cried ecstatically.
"The whole town is desolate. All the  cars  have the left rear wheel painted
black as a mourning  wreath,  and  there's a persistent wail all night along
the north  shore."  "How gorgeous! Let's go back,  Tom. To-morrow!" Then she
added  irrelevantly:  "You  ought to  see the baby." "I'd like  to."  "She's
asleep.  She's three  years old. Haven't you ever seen her?" "Never." "Well,
you  ought  to  see  her.  She's----"  Tom  Buchanan,  who had been hovering
restlessly about the room, stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder. "What
you doing, Nick?" "I'm a bond man." "Who with?" I told him.  "Never heard of
them,"  he  remarked  decisively.  This annoyed me.  "You will," I  answered
shortly. "You will if you stay in  the  East." "Oh, I'll stay in  the  East,
don't you worry," he said, glancing  at Daisy and then back at me, as if  he
were  alert for something  more. "I'd be  a God damned fool to live anywhere
else."  At this  point Miss  Baker said: "Absolutely!" with  such suddenness
that I started--it  was  the  first  word she uttered since I came  into the
room. Evidently  it surprised  her  as much as it did me, for she yawned and
with a series of rapid, deft  movements stood up into the room. "I'm stiff,"
she complained,  "I've  been lying  on  that  sofa  for  as  long as  I  can
remember." "Don't look  at me," Daisy retorted, "I've been trying to get you
to New  York all  afternoon." "No, thanks,"  said  Miss Baker  to  the  four
cocktails just  in from the pantry, "I'm  absolutely in training."  Her host
looked at her incredulously. "You are!" He took down his drink as if it were
a drop in the bottom  of a glass. "How you ever get  anything done is beyond
me." I looked at Miss Baker, wondering what it was she "got done." I enjoyed
looking at  her.  She was  a  slender,  small-breasted girl,  with  an erect
carriage, which  she  accentuated  by  throwing her  body  backward  at  the
shoulders like a young cadet. Her gray  sun-strained eyes  looked back at me
with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming, discontented  face.
It occurred  to me  now that I had seen her,  or a picture of her, somewhere
before. "You live  in  West  Egg,"  she  remarked  contemptuously.  "I  know
somebody  there."  "I  don't  know  a  single----" "You  must  know Gatsby."
"Gatsby?" demanded Daisy. "What Gatsby?" Before I could reply that he was my
neighbor dinner was  announced; wedging  his  tense  arm imperatively  under
mine,  Tom Buchanan  compelled me from the room  as  though he were moving a
checker to another square.  Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on
their hips, the two  young women preceded  us out onto a rosy-colored porch,
open  toward the  sunset, where  four candles flickered on the table  in the
diminished wind.  "Why CANDLES?" objected Daisy, frowning. She  snapped them
out with her fingers. "In two weeks it'll be the  longest day in  the year."
She looked at us all radiantly. "Do you always watch for the longest  day of
the year and then  miss it? I always watch for the  longest day in the  year
and then miss it." "We ought to  plan something," yawned Miss Baker, sitting
down at the table  as if she were getting into bed. "All right," said Daisy.
"What'll  we  plan?"  She  turned  to me helplessly: "What do people  plan?"
Before I  could answer  her eyes fastened  with  an  awed expression on  her
little  finger.  "Look!" she complained;  "I  hurt  it." We all  looked--the
knuckle was  black and blue. "You did it, Tom," she said accusingly. "I know
you didn't mean to, but  you DID do  it. That's  what  I get for marrying  a
brute of a man, a great, big, hulking physical  specimen  of  a----" "I hate
that  word  hulking," objected Tom  crossly, "even in  kidding."  "Hulking,"
insisted Daisy. Sometimes she  and Miss Baker talked at  once, unobtrusively
and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as
cool as their white dresses  and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all
desire. They  were here, and they accepted Tom and  me, making only a polite
pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew  that presently
dinner  would be over  and a little later the evening too would  be over and
casually put away. It was sharply different from the  West, where an evening
was  hurried  from  phase to  phase  toward  its  close,  in  a  continually
disappointed  anticipation  or else in  sheer nervous dread  of  the  moment
itself. "You  make me  feel uncivilized,  Daisy,"  I  confessed on my second
glass of  corky but rather impressive claret. "Can't you talk about crops or
something?" I meant nothing in  particular by  this remark, but it was taken
up in an unexpected way.  "Civilization's going to  pieces," broke  out  Tom
violently. "I've gotten to  be a terrible pessimist about  things. Have  you
read  'The Rise of the Colored Empires'  by this man Goddard?" "Why,  no," I
answered,  rather  surprised by his  tone.  "Well, it's  a  fine  book,  and
everybody ought  to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race
will  be--will be  utterly  submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's  been
proved." "Tom's  getting very  profound,"  said Daisy, with an expression of
unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them. What was
that word  we----"  "Well,  these  books are all scientific,"  insisted Tom,
glancing at her impatiently. "This  fellow has worked out  the whole  thing.
It's up to us,  who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races
will  have control of  things." "We've  got  to  beat  them down," whispered
Daisy,  winking  ferociously toward the fervent  sun.  "You ought to live in
California--" began Miss Baker, but  Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily
in his chair. "This idea is that we're Nordics. I  am, and  you are, and you
are,  and----" After an infinitesimal hesitation  he included  Daisy  with a
slight nod, and she winked at me again. "--And we've produced all the things
that go  to make civilization--oh,  science and art, and  all  that.  Do you
see?"  There  was  something  pathetic  in  his  concentration,  as  if  his
complacency,  more acute than of old, was not enough to him any  more. When,
almost immediately, the telephone  rang inside and the butler left the porch
Daisy  seized upon  the  momentary interruption  and leaned toward me. "I'll
tell  you a family secret," she whispered enthusiastically. "It's  about the
butler's nose. Do you want to hear about the butler's  nose?" "That's  why I
came over to-night." "Well, he wasn't  always  a  butler; he used to  be the
silver  polisher for  some people in New  York that had a silver service for
two  hundred people.  He had to  polish it  from morning  till  night, until
finally it began to  affect his  nose----"  "Things went from bad to worse,"
suggested Miss Baker. "Yes. Things went from bad to worse,  until finally he
had to give up  his position."  For  a  moment  the last sunshine fell  with
romantic  affection upon  her glowing  face; her voice  compelled me forward
breathlessly as I  listened--then  the glow faded,  each light deserting her
with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant  street at dusk. The
butler came back  and murmured something  close to Tom's ear, whereupon  Tom
frowned, pushed back  his chair, and without a word went inside. As  if  his
absence  quickened something  within her,  Daisy leaned  forward  again, her
voice glowing and singing.  "I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind
me of a--of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn't he?" She turned to Miss  Baker
for confirmation: "An absolute rose?" This was untrue. I am not even faintly
like a rose. She  was  only extemporizing, but a stirring warmth flowed from
her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those
breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table
and excused  herself and went into the  house. Miss Baker  and I exchanged a
short  glance consciously devoid of meaning. I was  about to speak  when she
sat up alertly  and said  "Sh!" in a warning  voice.  A subdued  impassioned
murmur was  audible  in  the  room  beyond,  and Miss Baker  leaned  forward
unashamed, trying  to hear.  The murmur trembled on the  verge of coherence,
sank down, mounted excitedly, and  then ceased altogether. "This  Mr. Gatsby
you  spoke of is my neighbor----" I said. "Don't talk. I want  to hear  what
happens." "Is something happening?" I inquired innocently.  "You mean to say
you  don't know?" said Miss Baker, honestly surprised. "I  thought everybody
knew." "I don't." "Why----" she  said hesitantly,  "Tom's got some woman  in
New  York." "Got some woman?"  I  repeated blankly.  Miss Baker nodded. "She
might  have the  decency  not  to  telephone him at dinner  time. Don't  you
think?" Almost before  I had grasped her meaning there was the  flutter of a
dress and the  crunch of leather boots, and Tom and Daisy were  back  at the
table. "It couldn't be helped!" cried Daisy with tense gaiety. She sat down,
glanced searchingly  at Miss Baker and  then at me, and continued: "I looked
outdoors for a minute, and it's  very romantic outdoors.  There's a  bird on
the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White
Star  Line. He's singing away----" Her voice sang: "It's romantic, isn't it,
Tom?"  "Very  romantic," he  said, and then miserably to me: "If it's  light
enough after dinner, I want to take you down to the  stables." The telephone
rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook  her head decisively at Tom the
subject  of the stables, in fact all  subjects, vanished into air. Among the
broken  fragments of the last five minutes  at table  I remember the candles
being  lit again, pointlessly,  and  I was  conscious  of  wanting  to  look
squarely at every one,  and  yet to avoid all eyes.  I  couldn't  guess what
Daisy and Tom  were thinking, but I doubt if even Miss Baker,  who seemed to
have mastered a certain hardy scepticism, was able utterly to put this fifth
guest's shrill metallic urgency  out  of mind. To a  certain temperament the
situation  might have  seemed intriguing--my  own instinct  was to telephone
immediately for the police.  The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned
again. Tom and  Miss Baker,  with  several feet  of  twilight  between them,
strolled back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible
body,  while,  trying  to look  pleasantly interested  and a little deaf,  I
followed Daisy around a chain of  connecting verandas to the porch in front.
In  its deep gloom we sat down side by  side on a  wicker settee. Daisy took
her  face in her  hands as  if  feeling its lovely shape, and her eyes moved
gradually out into the velvet dusk.  I saw that turbulent emotions possessed
her, so I asked what  I  thought would be some sedative questions about  her
little girl. "We don't  know each other very well, Nick," she said suddenly.
"Even if we are cousins. You didn't come to my wedding." "I wasn't back from
the  war." "That's true."  She  hesitated. "Well, I've had a very  bad time,
Nick, and I'm pretty cynical about everything." Evidently she  had reason to
be.  I waited but she didn't say  any  more, and after  a  moment I returned
rather  feebly  to the  subject  of  her  daughter.  "I suppose  she  talks,
and--eats, and everything." "Oh, yes." She looked  at me  absently. "Listen,
Nick; let  me tell  you  what I  said when  she was born. Would  you like to
hear?" "Very much." "It'll show  you how I've gotten to feel  about--things.
Well, she was less than  an hour  old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up
out of the  ether with  an  utterly abandoned  feeling, and asked the  nurse
right  away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was  a  girl, and so I
turned  my head away and wept. 'all  right,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a  girl.
And I hope she'll  be a fool--that's the  best thing  a girl can be  in this
world, a  beautiful  little  fool."  "You see I think  everything's terrible
anyhow,"  she went  on  in  a  convinced way. "Everybody thinks so--the most
advanced  people. And I KNOW.  I've been  everywhere and seen everything and
done everything." Her eyes flashed around her in  a defiant way, rather like
Tom's,  and she  laughed  with  thrilling  scorn.  "Sophisticated--God,  I'm
sophisticated!"  The instant  her voice  broke  off,  ceasing  to compel  my
attention, my  belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It
made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to
exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment
she  looked at me with  an absolute smirk  on her lovely face, as if she had
asserted her  membership  in a rather distinguished secret society to  which
she  and Tom  belonged. Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light. Tom and
Miss Baker sat at either  end of the  long  couch and she read  aloud to him
from  the  SATURDAY  EVENING  POST.--the  words,  murmurous and uninflected,
running together in a soothing tune. The lamp-light, bright on his boots and
dull on  the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the  paper as she
turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms. When we came in
she held us silent for a moment with  a  lifted hand. "To be continued," she
said, tossing the magazine on  the table, "in our very next issue." Her body
asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she stood up. "Ten
o'clock," she  remarked, apparently  finding the time on  the ceiling. "Time
for this good girl to  go to bed." "Jordan's going to play in the tournament
to-morrow,"  explained Daisy,  "over  at  Westchester."  "Oh--you're  Jordan
BAKER."  I  knew now  why her face  was familiar--its  pleasing contemptuous
expression had  looked  out  at me from  many rotogravure  pictures  of  the
sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I  had heard some
story of  her too,  a critical, unpleasant  story, but  what it  was  I  had
forgotten long ago. "Good night,"  she said softly. "Wake me at eight, won't
you."  "If you'll get up." "I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon."
"Of course you will," confirmed Daisy.  "In  fact  I  think  I'll arrange  a
marriage. Come  over often, Nick, and  I'll sort of--oh--fling you together.
You know--lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out  to sea
in a boat, and  all that sort  of thing----" "Good night," called Miss Baker
from the stairs. "I  haven't  heard  a word." "She's a nice girl,"  said Tom
after a moment. "They oughtn't  to let her run around the country this way."
"Who oughtn't to?"  inquired  Daisy coldly. "Her family." "Her family is one
aunt about  a thousand years  old. Besides, Nick's going to look  after her,
aren't you, Nick?  She's going  to  spend  lots of  week-ends out here  this
summer. I think the home influence will be very good for her." Daisy and Tom
looked at  each other for a  moment in silence. "Is she from  New  York?"  I
asked quickly. "From  Louisville. Our white  girlhood  was  passed  together
there. Our beautiful white----" "Did  you give Nick a  little heart to heart
talk  on the veranda?" demanded Tom suddenly. "Did I?" She looked  at me. "I
can't seem  to  remember, but I think we talked about the  Nordic race. Yes,
I'm sure we did. It sort of crept  up on  us  and  first thing you know----"
"Don't  believe  everything you  hear, Nick," he advised me. I said  lightly
that I had  heard nothing  at all, and a few  minutes later I  got up to  go
home.  They came to the door with  me and stood  side by  side in a cheerful
square of light. As I started my motor Daisy peremptorily called: "Wait!" "I
forgot  to ask  you something, and it's important. We heard you were engaged
to a girl out West." "That's right," corroborated Tom kindly. "We heard that
you  were  engaged." "It's libel. I'm too poor." "But we heard it," insisted
Daisy, surprising me by opening up again in a flower-like way. "We  heard it
from  three people, so it must be  true." Of  course I  knew what they  were
referring to,  but I wasn't even  vaguely engaged. The  fact that gossip had
published  the banns was one of the reasons I  had come East. You can't stop
going with an  old friend on account of rumors, and on the other  hand I had
no intention of being rumored  into  marriage. Their interest rather touched
me and  made them  less  remotely rich--nevertheless, I  was  confused and a
little disgusted as I  drove away. It seemed to me that the  thing for Daisy
to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms--but apparently there were
no such intentions in her head. As for Tom, the fact that he "had some woman
in New York." was really less surprising  than that he had been depressed by
a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his
sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart. Already it
was deep  summer on roadhouse  roofs and in front of  wayside garages, where
new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at
West Egg I ran the car under its shed  and  sat for a while  on an abandoned
grass roller in the yard. The wind  had  blown off,  leaving  a loud, bright
night, with wings beating in  the trees and a  persistent organ sound as the
full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The  silhouette  of a
moving cat wavered across the moonlight,  and turning my head to watch it, I
saw  that I was not  alone--fifty feet away a  figure  had emerged  from the
shadow of  my  neighbor's  mansion  and was standing  with his hands  in his
pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely
movements  and the secure  position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that
it was Mr. Gatsby himself,  come out to  determine what share was his of our
local  heavens.  I decided  to call  to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at
dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn't call to him, for
he  gave a  sudden intimation that he was  content to be alone--he stretched
out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way,  and, far as I was from
him,  I  could  have  sworn  he  was  trembling.  Involuntarily   I  glanced
seaward--and distinguished nothing except a  single green  light, minute and
far away,  that might have  been  the end of a dock. When I looked once more
for Gatsby  he had vanished, and I was alone again in  the unquiet darkness.
Chapter  2  About  half way between  West Egg and  New York  the motor  road
hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as
to shrink  away from  a certain desolate area of  land. This  is a valley of
ashes--a fantastic  farm  where ashes  grow like wheat into ridges and hills
and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and
rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly
and already crumbling through  the powdery air. Occasionally a  line of gray
cars crawls along an invisible  track, gives out  a ghastly creak, and comes
to  rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up  with  leaden spades and
stir up  an impenetrable cloud, which  screens their obscure operations from
your sight. But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift
endlessly  over it,  you perceive, after  a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J.
Eckleburg. The eyes of  Doctor T.  J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic--their
irises are  one yard high.  They look out of no  face,  but, instead, from a
pair  of enormous  yellow spectacles  which pass  over a  nonexistent  nose.
Evidently some wild wag of an oculist  set them there to fatten his practice
in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness,
or forgot  them  and  moved  away. But  his eyes,  dimmed a little  by  many
paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river,  and, when
the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains
can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a
halt there of at least a minute, and it was because of this that I first met
Tom Buchanan's mistress. The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever
he was known.  His  acquaintances  resented the fact  that he  turned up  in
popular  restaurants with her and,  leaving her at a table, sauntered about,
chatting with whomsoever he knew.  Though I was curious to see her, I had no
desire to meet her--but I did. I went up to New York  with  Tom on the train
one afternoon,  and  when we stopped by the  ashheaps  he jumped to his feet
and, taking  hold  of my  elbow,  literally  forced  me from the car. "We're
getting off," he insisted. "I want you to meet my girl." I think he'd tanked
up  a  good  deal  at luncheon,  and his  determination  to  have my company
bordered  on  violence.  The  supercilious  assumption  was  that on  Sunday
afternoon I had nothing  better to do. I followed him over a low whitewashed
railroad  fence, and we walked  back a  hundred yards along  the road  under
Doctor Eckleburg's  persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small
block of yellow  brick sitting  on  the  edge of the  waste land,  a sort of
compact Main Street ministering to it, and contiguous to absolutely nothing.
One  of  the three shops  it  contained was  for rent  and  another  was  an
all-night  restaurant,  approached  by  a trail  of ashes;  the third was  a
garage--Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars bought and sold.--and I followed Tom
inside. The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the
dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred
to me that  this shadow of a garage must be a blind, and that sumptuous  and
romantic  apartments were concealed  overhead,  when the  proprietor himself
appeared in the door of  an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He
was a blond, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a
damp  gleam of  hope sprang  into  his  light blue eyes. "Hello, Wilson, old
man," said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder.  "How's business?" "I
can't complain," answered Wilson unconvincingly. "When are you going to sell
me that  car?" "Next week; I've got my man working on it now." "Works pretty
slow, don't  he?" "No, he doesn't," said  Tom coldly. "And if you  feel that
way about  it, maybe I'd better sell  it somewhere else after all." "I don't
mean that," explained Wilson quickly. "I just meant----" His voice faded off
and Tom glanced impatiently  around the garage. Then I  heard footsteps on a
stairs, and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light
from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but
she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women  can. Her face, above
a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine,  contained no facet or gleam of
beauty,  but there was an immediately  perceptible  vitality about her as if
the  nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and,
walking  through  her husband as if  he were a ghost, shook hands with  Tom,
looking him  flush  in the eye.  Then she wet her  lips, and without turning
around  spoke to  her husband in a soft, coarse voice: "Get some chairs, why
don't you, so somebody can sit down." "Oh, sure,"  agreed Wilson  hurriedly,
and  went  toward the little  office, mingling immediately  with  the cement
color of the walls. A  white  ashen dust  veiled his dark suit and  his pale
hair as  it veiled  everything in  the vicinity--except  his wife, who moved
close  to Tom. "I want to see you," said  Tom  intently.  "Get  on the  next
train." "All  right." "I'll meet you by the news-stand on the lower  level."
She nodded  and moved away from him just as  George  Wilson emerged with two
chairs  from  his  office door.  We  waited for her down the road and out of
sight. It was a  few days before  the Fourth of July,  and a  gray,  scrawny
Italian  child was setting  torpedoes in  a  row  along the  railroad track.
"Terrible place,  isn't  it,"  said  Tom,  exchanging  a frown  with  Doctor
Eckleburg.  "Awful."  "It does her good to get  away."  "Doesn't her husband
object?" "Wilson? He  thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so
dumb he doesn't know he's alive." So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up
together  to New York--or not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly
in another car.  Tom deferred that  much to the sensibilities of those  East
Eggers who  might  be on the train.  She had  changed her dress  to a  brown
figured muslin, which  stretched tight over  her  rather  wide hips  as  Tom
helped her to the platform in New York. At the news-stand she bought  a copy
of TOWN TATTLE. and a moving-picture magazine, and in the station drug-store
some  cold  cream  and  a small flask  of perfume. Up-stairs,  in the solemn
echoing drive she let  four taxicabs  drive  away before she selected  a new
one, lavender-colored with gray upholstery, and in this we slid out from the
mass of the station into  the  glowing suns