The Great Gatsby

The idea is if
we don't look out the white race will be--will be utterly submerged.

Da Fontano the promoter came there, and Ed Legros and James B.
("Rot-Gut") Ferret and the De Jongs and Ernest Lilly--they came to
gamble and when Ferret wandered into the garden it meant he was
cleaned out and Associated Traction would have to fluctuate profitably
next day.

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.

"But I swore
I wouldn't tell it and here I am tantalizing you."

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.

Together we scrutinized the twelve lemon cakes from the delicatessen
shop.

The dilatory limousine came rolling up the drive.

We heard you were
engaged to a girl out West."

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.

"That's right," corroborated Tom kindly.

After the house, we were to see the grounds and the swimming pool, and the
hydroplane and the midsummer flowers--but outside Gatsby's window it
began to rain again so we stood in a row looking at the corrugated
surface of the Sound.

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.

Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a
constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the
river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of
non-olfactory money.

The
bar is in full swing and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the
garden outside until the air is alive with chatter and laughter and
casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot and
enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names.

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.

Now he was a sturdy, straw haired
man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner.

Yours truly
MEYER WOLFSHIEM_

and then hasty addenda beneath:

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

A celebrated tenor had
sung in Italian and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz and between
the numbers people were doing "stunts" all over the garden, while happy
vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky.

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.

Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at
me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented
face.

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.

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.

Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a
constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the
river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of
non-olfactory money.

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.

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.

Da Fontano the promoter came there, and Ed Legros and James B.
("Rot-Gut") Ferret and the De Jongs and Ernest Lilly--they came to
gamble and when Ferret wandered into the garden it meant he was
cleaned out and Associated Traction would have to fluctuate profitably
next day.

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.

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.

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.

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 had expected that Mr. Gatsby would be a florid and
corpulent person in his middle years.

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.

Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more
rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the
old alignment gave a blurred air to her face.

"The whole town is desolate.

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.

When she moved about
there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets
jingled up and down upon her arms.

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.

On buffet tables, garnished with
glistening hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of
harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold.

"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.

The
bar is in full swing and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the
garden outside until the air is alive with chatter and laughter and
casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot and
enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names.

Mr. Wolfshiem
raised his hand in a sort of benediction.

I had them both on their feet with the desperate suggestion that
they help me make tea in the kitchen when the demoniac Finn brought it in
on a tray.

This quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in
the shape of restlessness.

It
appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances which had
elicited this tribute from Montenegro's warm little heart.

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.

In a basket, swung from his neck, cowered a dozen very
recent puppies of an indeterminate breed.

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.

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.

The caterwauling horns had reached a crescendo and I turned away and
cut across the lawn toward home.

"My dear," she told her sister in a high mincing shout, "most of these
fellas will cheat you every time.

He was now decently clothed
in a "sport shirt" open at the neck, sneakers and duck trousers of a
nebulous hue.

A succulent hash arrived, and Mr. Wolfshiem, forgetting the more
sentimental atmosphere of the old Metropole, began to eat with
ferocious delicacy.

My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a
small eye-sore, 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.

I had expected that Mr. Gatsby would be a florid and
corpulent person in his middle years.

In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked
with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of
his female guests were too young to know one from another.

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.

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.

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.

I saw that turbulent
emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some
sedative questions about her little girl.

"Don't be morbid," Jordan said.

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.

"Anyhow he gives large parties," said Jordan, changing the subject
with an urbane distaste for the concrete.

I wanted to get out and walk
eastward toward the park through the soft twilight but each time I tried
to go I became entangled in some wild strident argument which pulled me
back, as if with ropes, into my chair.

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

A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room
beyond and Miss Baker leaned forward, unashamed, trying to hear.

The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.

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.

She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage, and given this
unwillingness I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she
was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the
world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard jaunty body.

His head leaned back so far that it rested against the face of a
defunct mantelpiece clock and from this position his distraught eyes
stared down at Daisy who was sitting frightened but graceful on the
edge of a stiff chair.

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

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.

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.

He's quite a character around New York--a denizen of
Broadway."

Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives
out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey
men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud
which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

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.

"No, you don't," interposed Tom quickly.

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