F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" Chapters 6-9

Yours truly MEYER WOLFSHIEM_

and then hasty addenda beneath:

_Let me know about the funeral etc do not know his family at all._

He was a son of God--a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that--and he must be about His Father's Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty.

He fumbled at the embroidered coverlet, trying to take it from the bed, and lay down stiffly--was instantly asleep.

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.

But what had amused me then turned septic on the air now.

The none too savory ramifications by which Ella Kaye, the newspaper woman, played Madame de Maintenon to his weakness and sent him to sea in a yacht, were common knowledge to the turgid journalism of 1902.

"No."

From the ballroom beneath, muffled and suffocating chords were drifting up on hot waves of air.

For several weeks I didn't see him or hear his voice on the phone--mostly I was in New York, trotting around with Jordan and trying to ingratiate myself with her senile aunt--but finally I went over to his house one Sunday afternoon.

It transpired after a confused five minutes that the man had heard Gatsby's name around his office in a connection which he either wouldn't reveal or didn't fully understand.

Someone with a positive manner, perhaps a detective, used the expression "mad man" as he bent over Wilson's body that afternoon, and the adventitious authority of his voice set the key for the newspaper reports next morning.

Flushed with his impassioned gibberish he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.

She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented "place" that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village--appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing.

She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented "place" that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village--appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing.

"Wha?"

A massive and lethargic woman, who had been urging Daisy to play golf with her at the local club tomorrow, spoke in Miss Baedeker's defence:

"Oh, she's all right now.

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.

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.

I tried four times; finally an exasperated central told me the wire was being kept open for long distance from Detroit.

But when I'd shouted "Hello" several times in vain an argument broke out behind a partition and presently a lovely Jewess appeared at an interior door and scrutinized me with black hostile eyes.

The dilatory limousine came rolling up the drive.

Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels.

He fumbled at the embroidered coverlet, trying to take it from the bed, and lay down stiffly--was instantly asleep.

They had difficulty in locating the sister, Catherine.

He looked at me anxiously as if he hoped I'd corroborate this.

A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental burden.

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 an

Instinct made him step on the accelerator with the double purpose of overtaking Daisy and leaving Wilson behind, and we sped along toward Astoria at fifty miles an hour, until, among the spidery girders of the elevated, we came in sight of the easygoing blue coupé.

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.

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.

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.

The none too savory ramifications by which Ella Kaye, the newspaper woman, played Madame de Maintenon to his weakness and sent him to sea in a yacht, were common knowledge to the turgid journalism of 1902.

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.

Gatsby stood in the center of the crimson carpet and gazed around with fascinated eyes.

His eyes leaked continuously with excitement and when I took the bag and umbrella from his hands he began to pull so incessantly at his sparse grey beard that I had difficulty in getting off his coat.

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.

After a pause he added "sir" in a dilatory, grudging way.

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.

So Wilson was reduced to a man "deranged by grief" in order that the case might remain in its simplest form.

The circle closed up again with a running murmur of expostulation; it was a minute before I could see anything at all.

He winced.

The none too savory ramifications by which Ella Kaye, the newspaper woman, played Madame de Maintenon to his weakness and sent him to sea in a yacht, were common knowledge to the turgid journalism of 1902.

After she had obliterated three years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken.

"Certainly not for a common swindler who'd have to steal the ring he put on her finger."

There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.

The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.

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.

They were gone, without a word, snapped out, made accidental, isolated, like ghosts even from our pity.

He looked--and this is said in all contempt for the babbled slander of his garden--as if he had "killed a man."

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.

"Well, he certainly must have strained himself to get this menagerie together."

He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions.

It amazed him--he had never been in such a beautiful house before.

Each of us said over and over that it was a "crazy idea"--we all talked at once to a baffled clerk and thought, or pretended to think, that we were being very funny.

And yet I couldn't believe that they would choose this occasion for a scene--especially for the rather harrowing scene that Gatsby had outlined in the garden.

There was an inexplicable amount of dust everywhere and the rooms were musty as though they hadn't been aired for many days.

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.

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.

I ejaculated an unrestrained "Huh!" and he must have heard me for he went on nervously:

"What I called up about was a pair of shoes I left there.

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.

The prolonged and tumultuous argument that ended by herding us into that room eludes me, though I have a sharp physical memory that, in the course of it, my underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around my legs and intermittent beads of sweat raced cool across my back.

Tom was evidently perturbed at Daisy's running around alone, for on the following Saturday night he came with her to Gatsby's party.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.

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.

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.

Somehow, that seemed a despicable occupation.

I remember the portrait of him up in Gatsby's bedroom, a grey, florid man with a hard empty face--the pioneer debauchee who during one phase of American life brought back to the eastern seaboard the savage violence of the frontier brothel and saloon.

The prolonged and tumultuous argument that ended by herding us into that room eludes me, though I have a sharp physical memory that, in the course of it, my underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around my legs and intermittent beads of sweat raced cool across my back.

The room was large and stifling, and, though it was already four o'clock, opening the windows admitted only a gust of hot shrubbery from the Park.

Simultaneously I heard his voice, gruff, muffled, husky, at the hall telephone.

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.

He drew me into his office, remarking in a reverent voice that it was a sad time for all of us, and offered me a cigar.

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.

Presently Tom lifted his head with a jerk and after staring around the garage with glazed eyes addressed a mumbled incoherent remark to the policeman.

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.

The blind was drawn but I found a rift at the sill.

She looked at Tom, alarmed now, but he insisted with magnanimous scorn.

On the green Sound, stagnant in the heat, one small sail crawled slowly toward the fresher sea.

He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career--when he saw Dan Cody's yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior.

I think he realizes that his presumptuous little flirtation is over."

Tom threw on both brakes impatiently and we slid to an abrupt dusty stop under Wilson's sign.

A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor.

This was his day off and with laudable initiative he had hurried out "to see."

"They carried him into my house," appended Jordan, "because we lived just two doors from the church.

Gatsby's notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his hospitality and so become authorities on his past, had increased all summer until he fell just short of being news.

There were the same people, or at least the same sort of people, the same profusion of champagne, the same many-colored, many-keyed commotion, but I felt an unpleasantness in the air, a pervading harshness that hadn't been there before.

Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace.

The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of compass, a thin red circle in the water.

But when he heard himself say this, he flinched and began to cry "Oh, my God!" again in his groaning voice.

As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat's shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.

He put his hands in his coat pockets and turned back eagerly to his scrutiny of the house, as though my presence marred the sacredness of the vigil.

He was incredulous.

Instinct made him step on the accelerator with the double purpose of overtaking Daisy and leaving Wilson behind, and we sped along toward Astoria at fifty miles an hour, until, among the spidery girders of the elevated, we came in sight of the easygoing blue coupé.

Gatsby turned to me rigidly:

"I can't say anything in his house, old sport."

Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something--an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago.

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.

There's something very sensuous about it--overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands."

At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

The Buchanans' house floated suddenly toward us through the dark rustling trees.

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.

The notion originated with Daisy's suggestion that we hire five bathrooms and take cold baths, and then assumed more tangible form as "a place to have a mint julep."

At any rate Cody asked him a few questions (one of them elicited the brand new name) and found that he was quick, and extravagantly ambitious.

The immediate contingency overtook him, pulled him back from the edge of the theoretical abyss.

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.

They had difficulty in locating the sister, Catherine.

Self consciously, with his authoritative arms breaking the way, we pushed through the still gathering crowd, passing a hurried doctor, case in hand, who had been sent for in wild hope half an hour ago.

He told me all this very much later, but I've put it down here with the idea of exploding those first wild rumors about his antecedents, which weren't even faintly true.

The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of compass, a thin red circle in the water.

"And you left him in the lurch, didn't you?

Presently Tom lifted his head with a jerk and after staring around the garage with glazed eyes addressed a mumbled incoherent remark to the policeman.

I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person.

It occurred to me that he had been very slowly bending toward her all evening to attain this proximity, and even while I watched I saw him stoop one ultimate degree and kiss at her cheek.

I walked back along the border of the lawn, traversed the gravel softly and tiptoed up the veranda steps.

There were the same people, or at least the same sort of people, the same profusion of champagne, the same many-colored, many-keyed commotion, but I felt an unpleasantness in the air, a pervading harshness that hadn't been there before.

In various unrevealed capacities he had come in contact with such people but always with indiscernible barbed wire between.

With a reluctant backward glance the well-disciplined child held to her nurse's hand and was pulled out the door, just as Tom came back, preceding four gin rickeys that clicked full of ice.

A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor.

Tom's arrogant eyes roamed the crowd.

She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented "place" that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village--appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing.

It might have lasted indefinitely except for the fact that Ella Kaye came on board one night in Boston and a week later Dan Cody inhospitably died.

He looked--and this is said in all contempt for the babbled slander of his garden--as if he had "killed a man."

Her expression was curiously familiar--it was an expression I had often seen on women's faces but on Myrtle Wilson's face it seemed purposeless and inexplicable until I realized that her eyes, wide with jealous terror, were fixed not on Tom, but on Jordan Baker, whom she took to be his wife.

In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the common store of life.

Tom talked incessantly, exulting and laughing, but his voice was as remote from Jordan and me as the foreign clamor on the sidewalk or the tumult of the elevated overhead.

They arrived at twilight and as we strolled out among the sparkling hundreds Daisy's voice was playing murmurous tricks in her throat.

But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot.

After Gatsby's death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes' power of correction.

Then they sauntered over to my house and sat on the steps for half an hour while at her request I remained watchfully in the garden: "In case there's a fire or a flood," she explained, "or any act of God."

Tom appeared from his oblivion as we were sitting down to supper together.

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.

With little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves, the laden mattress moved irregularly down the pool.

"Don't be morbid," Jordan said.

"I'd a little rather not be the polo player," said Tom pleasantly, "I'd rather look at all these famous people in--in oblivion."

Daisy watched him and laughed, her sweet, exciting laugh; a tiny gust of powder rose from her bosom into the air.

"You must be crazy!" exclaimed Tom automatically.

After a pause he added "sir" in a dilatory, grudging way.

For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.

Sometimes a shadow moved against a dressing-room blind above, gave way to another shadow, an indefinite procession of shadows, who rouged and powdered in an invisible glass.

But he knew that he was in Daisy's house by a colossal accident.

The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars.

For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.

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.

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.

The transactions in Montana copper that made him many times a millionaire found him physically robust but on the verge of soft-mindedness, and, suspecting this an infinite number of women tried to separate him from his money.

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.

He stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor's work with which he was to pay his way through.

But when I'd shouted "Hello" several times in vain an argument broke out behind a partition and presently a lovely Jewess appeared at an interior door and scrutinized me with black hostile eyes.

As Tom took up the receiver the compressed heat exploded into sound and we were listening to the portentous chords of Mendelssohn's Wedding March from the ballroom below.

Tom talked incessantly, exulting and laughing, but his voice was as remote from Jordan and me as the foreign clamor on the sidewalk or the tumult of the elevated overhead.

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.

That request seemed superfluous when I wrote it.

As Tom took up the receiver the compressed heat exploded into sound and we were listening to the portentous chords of Mendelssohn's Wedding March from the ballroom below.

The immediate contingency overtook him, pulled him back from the edge of the theoretical abyss.

A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor.

James Gatz--that was really, or at least legally, his name.

The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night.

The child, relinquished by the nurse, rushed across the room and rooted shyly into her mother's dress.

"You've got to pull yourself together," he said with soothing gruffness.

She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented "place" that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village--appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing.

After Gatsby's death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes' power of correction.

And it was from Cody that he inherited money--a legacy of twenty-five thousand dollars.

"Well, you come," she urged, concentrating on Gatsby.

It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.

As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat's shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.

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.

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.

Tom threw on both brakes impatiently and we slid to an abrupt dusty stop under Wilson's sign.

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.

I wondered if this partnership had included the World's Series transaction in 1919.

This was a forlorn hope--he was almost sure that Wilson had no friend: there was not enough of him for his wife.

The straw seats of the car hovered on the edge of combustion; the woman next to me perspired delicately for a while into her white shirtwaist, and then, as her newspaper dampened under her fingers, lapsed despairingly into deep heat with a desolate cry.

He was astounded.

The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night.

And we all took the less explicable step of engaging the parlor of a suite in the Plaza Hotel.

I helped him to a bedroom upstairs; while he took off his coat and vest I told him that all arrangements had been deferred until he came.

The transactions in Montana copper that made him many times a millionaire found him physically robust but on the verge of soft-mindedness, and, suspecting this an infinite number of women tried to separate him from his money.

We'd sit for hours----"

He broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers.

It was a random shot, and yet the reporter's instinct was right.

"They're a rotten crowd," I shouted across the lawn.

"We heard you yelling, so I said to Doc Civet here: 'There's somebody that needs your help, Doc.' "

"She's much obliged, I'm sure," said another friend, without gratitude.

For all I knew he was going to rob the house in a moment; I wouldn't have been surprised to see sinister faces, the faces of "Wolfshiem's people," behind him in the dark shrubbery.

He set down the receiver and came toward us, glistening slightly, to take our stiff straw hats.

As we walked across the moonlight gravel to the porch he disposed of the situation in a few brisk phrases.

It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.

But I didn't investigate.

The transactions in Montana copper that made him many times a millionaire found him physically robust but on the verge of soft-mindedness, and, suspecting this an infinite number of women tried to separate him from his money.

She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented "place" that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village--appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing.

He had reached an age where death no longer has the quality of ghastly surprise, and when he looked around him now for the first time and saw the height and splendor of the hall and the great rooms opening out from it into other rooms his grief began to be mixed with an awed pride.

Contemporary legends such as the "underground pipe-line to Canada" attached themselves to him, and there was one persistent story that he didn't live in a house at all, but in a boat that looked like a house and was moved secretly up and down the Long Island shore.

As my train emerged from the tunnel into sunlight, only the hot whistles of the National Biscuit Company broke the simmering hush at noon.

Some little boys had come up on the steps and were looking into the hall; when I told them who had arrived they went reluctantly away.

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.

Gatsby indicated a gorgeous, scarcely human orchid of a woman who sat in state under a white plum tree.

Michaelis and this man reached her first but when they had torn open her shirtwaist still damp with perspiration, they saw that her left breast was swinging loose like a flap and there was no need to listen for the heart beneath.

The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.

His eyes leaked continuously with excitement and when I took the bag and umbrella from his hands he began to pull so incessantly at his sparse grey beard that I had difficulty in getting off his coat.

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.

Wilson's eyes fell upon Tom; he started up on his tiptoes and then would have collapsed to his knees had not Tom held him upright.

Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something--an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago.

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.

He was employed in a vague personal capacity--while he remained with Cody he was in turn steward, mate, skipper, secretary, and even jailor, for Dan Cody sober knew what lavish doings Dan Cody drunk might soon be about and he provided for such contingencies by reposing more and more trust in Gatsby.

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.

Gatsby and I in turn leaned down and took the small reluctant hand.

This was his day off and with laudable initiative he had hurried out "to see."

Before me stretched the portentous menacing road of a new decade.

Tom and I shook hands, the rest of us exchanged a cool nod and they trotted quickly down the drive, disappearing under the August foliage just as Gatsby with hat and light overcoat in hand came out the front door.

She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented "place" that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village--appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing.

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.

Mr. Sloane didn't enter into the conversation but lounged back haughtily in his chair; the woman said nothing either--until unexpectedly, after two highballs, she became cordial.

He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

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.

At first I couldn't find the source of the high, groaning words that echoed clamorously through the bare garage--then I saw Wilson standing on the raised threshold of his office, swaying back and forth and holding to the doorposts with both hands.

Tom threw on both brakes impatiently and we slid to an abrupt dusty stop under Wilson's sign.

Then Tom's voice, incredulous and insulting:

"You must have gone there about the time Biloxi went to New Haven."

You may think that's sentimental but I mean it--to the bitter end."

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.

She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented "place" that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village--appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing.

He stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor's work with which he was to pay his way through.

Gatsby asked me to wait until he was free and I lingered in the garden until the inevitable swimming party had run up, chilled and exalted, from the black beach, until the lights were extinguished in the guest rooms overhead.

He stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor's work with which he was to pay his way through.

We'd sit for hours----"

He broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers.

The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night.

The straw seats of the car hovered on the edge of combustion; the woman next to me perspired delicately for a while into her white shirtwaist, and then, as her newspaper dampened under her fingers, lapsed despairingly into deep heat with a desolate cry.

Over the ashheaps the giant eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg kept their vigil but I perceived, after a moment, that other eyes were regarding us with peculiar intensity from less than twenty feet away.

They were gone, without a word, snapped out, made accidental, isolated, like ghosts even from our pity.

Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions and next they'll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white."

Daisy looked at Tom frowning and an indefinable expression, at once definitely unfamiliar and vaguely recognizable, as if I had only heard it described in words, passed over Gatsby's face.

I became aware now of a hollow, wailing sound which issued incessantly from the garage, a sound which as we got out of the coupé and walked toward the door resolved itself into the words "Oh, my God!" uttered over and over in a gasping moan.

When they convinced her of this she immediately fainted as if that was the intolerable part of the affair.

His brown, hardening body lived naturally through the half fierce, half lazy work of the bracing days.

It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.

Human sympathy has its limits and we were content to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind.

As my train emerged from the tunnel into sunlight, only the hot whistles of the National Biscuit Company broke the simmering hush at noon.

The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of compass, a thin red circle in the water.

"Oh, yes," said Tom, gruffly polite but obviously not remembering.

But he would be uneasy anyhow until he had given them something, realizing in a vague way that that was all they came for.

And we all took the less explicable step of engaging the parlor of a suite in the Plaza Hotel.

They arrived at twilight and as we strolled out among the sparkling hundreds Daisy's voice was playing murmurous tricks in her throat.

I became aware now of a hollow, wailing sound which issued incessantly from the garage, a sound which as we got out of the coupé and walked toward the door resolved itself into the words "Oh, my God!" uttered over and over in a gasping moan.

Perhaps some unbelievable guest would arrive, a person infinitely rare and to be marvelled at, some authentically radiant young girl who with one fresh glance at Gatsby, one moment of magical encounter, would blot out those five years of unwavering devotion.

Half an hour later Daisy herself telephoned and seemed relieved to find that I was coming.

"Please don't hurry," Gatsby urged them.

"I'm going to drain the pool today, Mr. Gatsby.

Sometimes a shadow moved against a dressing-room blind above, gave way to another shadow, an indefinite procession of shadows, who rouged and powdered in an invisible glass.

Then he made a harsh sound in his throat and with a violent thrusting movement of his powerful arms pushed his way through.