1It was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights in his house failed to go on one Saturday night—and, as obscurely as it had begun, his career as Trimalchio was over. Only gradually did I become aware that the automobiles which turned expectantly into his drive stayed for just a minute and then drove sulkily away. Wondering if he were sick I went over to find out—an unfamiliar butler with a villainous face squinted at me suspiciously from the door.

2“Is Mr. Gatsby sick?”

3“Nope.” After a pause he added “sir” in a dilatory, grudging way.

4“I hadn’t seen him around, and I was rather worried. Tell him Mr. Carraway came over.”

5“Who?” he demanded rudely.

6“Carraway.”

7“Carraway. All right, I’ll tell him.”

8Abruptly he slammed the door.

9My Finn informed me that Gatsby had dismissed every servant in his house a week ago and replaced them with half a dozen others, who never went into West Egg village to be bribed by the tradesmen, but ordered moderate supplies over the telephone. The grocery boy reported that the kitchen looked like a pigsty, and the general opinion in the village was that the new people weren’t servants at all.

10Next day Gatsby called me on the phone.

11“Going away?” I inquired.

12“No, old sport.”

13“I hear you fired all your servants.”

14“I wanted somebody who wouldn’t gossip. Daisy comes over quite often—in the afternoons.”

15So the whole caravansary had fallen in like a card house at the disapproval in her eyes.

16“They’re some people Wolfshiem wanted to do something for. They’re all brothers and sisters. They used to run a small hotel.”

17“I see.”

18He was calling up at Daisy’s request—would I come to lunch at her house tomorrow? Miss Baker would be there. Half an hour later Daisy herself telephoned and seemed relieved to find that I was coming. Something was up. 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.

19The next day was broiling, almost the last, certainly the warmest, of the summer. 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 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. Her pocketbook slapped to the floor.

20“Oh, my!” she gasped.

21I picked it up with a weary bend and handed it back to her, holding it at arm’s length and by the extreme tip of the corners to indicate that I had no designs upon it—but everyone near by, including the woman, suspected me just the same.

22“Hot!” said the conductor to familiar faces. “Some weather!… Hot!… Hot!… Hot!… Is it hot enough for you? Is it hot? Is it… ?”

23My commutation ticket came back to me with a dark stain from his hand. That anyone should care in this heat whose flushed lips he kissed, whose head made damp the pyjama pocket over his heart!

24… Through the hall of the Buchanans’ house blew a faint wind, carrying the sound of the telephone bell out to Gatsby and me as we waited at the door.

25“The master’s body?” roared the butler into the mouthpiece. “I’m sorry, madame, but we can’t furnish it—it’s far too hot to touch this noon!”

26What he really said was: “Yes… Yes… I’ll see.”

27He set down the receiver and came toward us, glistening slightly, to take our stiff straw hats.

28“Madame expects you in the salon!” he cried, needlessly indicating the direction. In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the common store of life.

29The room, shadowed well with awnings, was dark and cool. Daisy and Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols weighing down their own white dresses against the singing breeze of the fans.

30“We can’t move,” they said together.

31Jordan’s fingers, powdered white over their tan, rested for a moment in mine.

32“And Mr. Thomas Buchanan, the athlete?” I inquired.

33Simultaneously I heard his voice, gruff, muffled, husky, at the hall telephone.

34Gatsby stood in the centre of the crimson carpet and gazed around with fascinated eyes. Daisy watched him and laughed, her sweet, exciting laugh; a tiny gust of powder rose from her bosom into the air.

35“The rumour is,” whispered Jordan, “that that’s Tom’s girl on the telephone.”

36We were silent. The voice in the hall rose high with annoyance: “Very well, then, I won’t sell you the car at all… I’m under no obligations to you at all… and as for your bothering me about it at lunch time, I won’t stand that at all!”

37“Holding down the receiver,” said Daisy cynically.

38“No, he’s not,” I assured her. “It’s a bona-fide deal. I happen to know about it.”

39Tom flung open the door, blocked out its space for a moment with his thick body, and hurried into the room.

40“Mr. Gatsby!” He put out his broad, flat hand with well-concealed dislike. “I’m glad to see you, sir… Nick…”

41“Make us a cold drink,” cried Daisy.

42As he left the room again she got up and went over to Gatsby and pulled his face down, kissing him on the mouth.

43“You know I love you,” she murmured.

44“You forget there’s a lady present,” said Jordan.

45Daisy looked around doubtfully.

46“You kiss Nick too.”

47“What a low, vulgar girl!”

48“I don’t care!” cried Daisy, and began to clog on the brick fireplace. Then she remembered the heat and sat down guiltily on the couch just as a freshly laundered nurse leading a little girl came into the room.

49“Bles-sed pre-cious,” she crooned, holding out her arms. “Come to your own mother that loves you.”

50The child, relinquished by the nurse, rushed across the room and rooted shyly into her mother’s dress.

51“The bles-sed pre-cious! Did mother get powder on your old yellowy hair? Stand up now, and say—How-de-do.”

52Gatsby and I in turn leaned down and took the small reluctant hand. Afterward he kept looking at the child with surprise. I don’t think he had ever really believed in its existence before.

53“I got dressed before luncheon,” said the child, turning eagerly to Daisy.

54“That’s because your mother wanted to show you off.” Her face bent into the single wrinkle of the small white neck. “You dream, you. You absolute little dream.”

55“Yes,” admitted the child calmly. “Aunt Jordan’s got on a white dress too.”

56“How do you like mother’s friends?” Daisy turned her around so that she faced Gatsby. “Do you think they’re pretty?”

57“Where’s Daddy?”

58“She doesn’t look like her father,” explained Daisy. “She looks like me. She’s got my hair and shape of the face.”

59Daisy sat back upon the couch. The nurse took a step forward and held out her hand.

60“Come, Pammy.”

61“Goodbye, sweetheart!”

62With 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.

63Gatsby took up his drink.

64“They certainly look cool,” he said, with visible tension.

65We drank in long, greedy swallows.

66“I read somewhere that the sun’s getting hotter every year,” said Tom genially. “It seems that pretty soon the earth’s going to fall into the sun—or wait a minute—it’s just the opposite—the sun’s getting colder every year.

67“Come outside,” he suggested to Gatsby, “I’d like you to have a look at the place.”

68I went with them out to the veranda. On the green Sound, stagnant in the heat, one small sail crawled slowly toward the fresher sea. Gatsby’s eyes followed it momentarily; he raised his hand and pointed across the bay.

69“I’m right across from you.”

70“So you are.”

71Our eyes lifted over the rose-beds and the hot lawn and the weedy refuse of the dog-days alongshore. Slowly the white wings of the boat moved against the blue cool limit of the sky. Ahead lay the scalloped ocean and the abounding blessed isles.

72“There’s sport for you,” said Tom, nodding. “I’d like to be out there with him for about an hour.”

73We had luncheon in the dining-room, darkened too against the heat, and drank down nervous gaiety with the cold ale.

74“What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon?” cried Daisy, “and the day after that, and the next thirty years?”

75“Don’t be morbid,” Jordan said. “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”

76“But it’s so hot,” insisted Daisy, on the verge of tears, “and everything’s so confused. Let’s all go to town!”

77Her voice struggled on through the heat, beating against it, moulding its senselessness into forms.

78“I’ve heard of making a garage out of a stable,” Tom was saying to Gatsby, “but I’m the first man who ever made a stable out of a garage.”

79“Who wants to go to town?” demanded Daisy insistently. Gatsby’s eyes floated toward her. “Ah,” she cried, “you look so cool.”

80Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table.

81“You always look so cool,” she repeated.

82She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw. He was astounded. His mouth opened a little, and he looked at Gatsby, and then back at Daisy as if he had just recognized her as someone he knew a long time ago.

83“You resemble the advertisement of the man,” she went on innocently. “You know the advertisement of the man—”

84“All right,” broke in Tom quickly, “I’m perfectly willing to go to town. Come on—we’re all going to town.”

85He got up, his eyes still flashing between Gatsby and his wife. No one moved.

86“Come on!” His temper cracked a little. “What’s the matter, anyhow? If we’re going to town, let’s start.”

87His hand, trembling with his effort at self-control, bore to his lips the last of his glass of ale. Daisy’s voice got us to our feet and out on to the blazing gravel drive.

88“Are we just going to go?” she objected. “Like this? Aren’t we going to let anyone smoke a cigarette first?”

89“Everybody smoked all through lunch.”

90“Oh, let’s have fun,” she begged him. “It’s too hot to fuss.”

91He didn’t answer.

92“Have it your own way,” she said. “Come on, Jordan.”

93They went upstairs to get ready while we three men stood there shuffling the hot pebbles with our feet. A silver curve of the moon hovered already in the western sky. Gatsby started to speak, changed his mind, but not before Tom wheeled and faced him expectantly.

94“Have you got your stables here?” asked Gatsby with an effort.

95“About a quarter of a mile down the road.”

96“Oh.”

97A pause.

98“I don’t see the idea of going to town,” broke out Tom savagely. “Women get these notions in their heads—”

99“Shall we take anything to drink?” called Daisy from an upper window.

100“I’ll get some whisky,” answered Tom. He went inside.

101Gatsby turned to me rigidly:

102“I can’t say anything in his house, old sport.”

103“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of—” I hesitated.

104“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.

105That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it… High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl…

106Tom came out of the house wrapping a quart bottle in a towel, followed by Daisy and Jordan wearing small tight hats of metallic cloth and carrying light capes over their arms.

107“Shall we all go in my car?” suggested Gatsby. He felt the hot, green leather of the seat. “I ought to have left it in the shade.”

108“Is it standard shift?” demanded Tom.

109“Yes.”

110“Well, you take my coupé and let me drive your car to town.”

111The suggestion was distasteful to Gatsby.

112“I don’t think there’s much gas,” he objected.

113“Plenty of gas,” said Tom boisterously. He looked at the gauge. “And if it runs out I can stop at a drugstore. You can buy anything at a drugstore nowadays.”

114A pause followed this apparently pointless remark. 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.

115“Come on, Daisy,” said Tom, pressing her with his hand toward Gatsby’s car. “I’ll take you in this circus wagon.”

116He opened the door, but she moved out from the circle of his arm.

117“You take Nick and Jordan. We’ll follow you in the coupé.”

118She walked close to Gatsby, touching his coat with her hand. Jordan and Tom and I got into the front seat of Gatsby’s car, Tom pushed the unfamiliar gears tentatively, and we shot off into the oppressive heat, leaving them out of sight behind.

119“Did you see that?” demanded Tom.

120“See what?”

121He looked at me keenly, realizing that Jordan and I must have known all along.

122“You think I’m pretty dumb, don’t you?” he suggested. “Perhaps I am, but I have a—almost a second sight, sometimes, that tells me what to do. Maybe you don’t believe that, but science—”

123He paused. The immediate contingency overtook him, pulled him back from the edge of theoretical abyss.

124“I’ve made a small investigation of this fellow,” he continued. “I could have gone deeper if I’d known—”

125“Do you mean you’ve been to a medium?” inquired Jordan humorously.

126“What?” Confused, he stared at us as we laughed. “A medium?”

127“About Gatsby.”

128“About Gatsby! No, I haven’t. I said I’d been making a small investigation of his past.”

129“And you found he was an Oxford man,” said Jordan helpfully.

130“An Oxford man!” He was incredulous. “Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit.”

131“Nevertheless he’s an Oxford man.”

132“Oxford, New Mexico,” snorted Tom contemptuously, “or something like that.”

133“Listen, Tom. If you’re such a snob, why did you invite him to lunch?” demanded Jordan crossly.

134“Daisy invited him; she knew him before we were married—God knows where!”

135We were all irritable now with the fading ale, and aware of it we drove for a while in silence. Then as Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s faded eyes came into sight down the road, I remembered Gatsby’s caution about gasoline.

136“We’ve got enough to get us to town,” said Tom.

137“But there’s a garage right here,” objected Jordan. “I don’t want to get stalled in this baking heat.”

138Tom threw on both brakes impatiently, and we slid to an abrupt dusty stop under Wilson’s sign. After a moment the proprietor emerged from the interior of his establishment and gazed hollow-eyed at the car.

139“Let’s have some gas!” cried Tom roughly. “What do you think we stopped for—to admire the view?”

140“I’m sick,” said Wilson without moving. “Been sick all day.”

141“What’s the matter?”

142“I’m all run down.”

143“Well, shall I help myself?” Tom demanded. “You sounded well enough on the phone.”

144With an effort Wilson left the shade and support of the doorway and, breathing hard, unscrewed the cap of the tank. In the sunlight his face was green.

145“I didn’t mean to interrupt your lunch,” he said. “But I need money pretty bad, and I was wondering what you were going to do with your old car.”

146“How do you like this one?” inquired Tom. “I bought it last week.”

147“It’s a nice yellow one,” said Wilson, as he strained at the handle.

148“Like to buy it?”

149“Big chance,” Wilson smiled faintly. “No, but I could make some money on the other.”

150“What do you want money for, all of a sudden?”

151“I’ve been here too long. I want to get away. My wife and I want to go West.”

152“Your wife does,” exclaimed Tom, startled.

153“She’s been talking about it for ten years.” He rested for a moment against the pump, shading his eyes. “And now she’s going whether she wants to or not. I’m going to get her away.”

154The coupé flashed by us with a flurry of dust and the flash of a waving hand.

155“What do I owe you?” demanded Tom harshly.

156“I just got wised up to something funny the last two days,” remarked Wilson. “That’s why I want to get away. That’s why I been bothering you about the car.”

157“What do I owe you?”

158“Dollar twenty.”

159The relentless beating heat was beginning to confuse me and I had a bad moment there before I realized that so far his suspicions hadn’t alighted on Tom. He had discovered that Myrtle had some sort of life apart from him in another world, and the shock had made him physically sick. I stared at him and then at Tom, who had made a parallel discovery less than an hour before—and it occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well. Wilson was so sick that he looked guilty, unforgivably guilty—as if he had just got some poor girl with child.

160“I’ll let you have that car,” said Tom. “I’ll send it over tomorrow afternoon.”

161That locality was always vaguely disquieting, even in the broad glare of afternoon, and now I turned my head as though I had been warned of something behind. Over the ash-heaps 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.

162In one of the windows over the garage the curtains had been moved aside a little, and Myrtle Wilson was peering down at the car. 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. 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.

163There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind, and as we drove away Tom was feeling the hot whips of panic. His wife and his mistress, until an hour ago secure and inviolate, were slipping precipitately from his control. 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.

164“Those big movies around Fiftieth Street are cool,” suggested Jordan. “I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone’s away. There’s something very sensuous about it—overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.”

165The word “sensuous” had the effect of further disquieting Tom, but before he could invent a protest the coupé came to a stop, and Daisy signalled us to draw up alongside.

166“Where are we going?” she cried.

167“How about the movies?”

168“It’s so hot,” she complained. “You go. We’ll ride around and meet you after.” With an effort her wit rose faintly. “We’ll meet you on some corner. I’ll be the man smoking two cigarettes.”

169“We can’t argue about it here,” Tom said impatiently, as a truck gave out a cursing whistle behind us. “You follow me to the south side of Central Park, in front of the Plaza.”

170Several times he turned his head and looked back for their car, and if the traffic delayed them he slowed up until they came into sight. I think he was afraid they would dart down a side-street and out of his life forever.

171But they didn’t. And we all took the less explicable step of engaging the parlour of a suite in the Plaza Hotel.

172The 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 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.” 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…

173The 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. Daisy went to the mirror and stood with her back to us, fixing her hair.

174“It’s a swell suite,” whispered Jordan respectfully, and everyone laughed.

175“Open another window,” commanded Daisy, without turning around.

176“There aren’t any more.”

177“Well, we’d better telephone for an axe—”

178“The thing to do is to forget about the heat,” said Tom impatiently. “You make it ten times worse by crabbing about it.”

179He unrolled the bottle of whisky from the towel and put it on the table.

180“Why not let her alone, old sport?” remarked Gatsby. “You’re the one that wanted to come to town.”

181There was a moment of silence. The telephone book slipped from its nail and splashed to the floor, whereupon Jordan whispered, “Excuse me”—but this time no one laughed.

182“I’ll pick it up,” I offered.

183“I’ve got it.” Gatsby examined the parted string, muttered “Hum!” in an interested way, and tossed the book on a chair.

184“That’s a great expression of yours, isn’t it?” said Tom sharply.

185“What is?”

186“All this ‘old sport’ business. Where’d you pick that up?”

187“Now see here, Tom,” said Daisy, turning around from the mirror, “if you’re going to make personal remarks I won’t stay here a minute. Call up and order some ice for the mint julep.”

188As 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.

189“Imagine marrying anybody in this heat!” cried Jordan dismally.

190“Still—I was married in the middle of June,” Daisy remembered. “Louisville in June! Somebody fainted. Who was it fainted, Tom?”

191“Biloxi,” he answered shortly.

192“A man named Biloxi. ‘Blocks’ Biloxi, and he made boxes—that’s a fact—and he was from Biloxi, Tennessee.”

193“They carried him into my house,” appended Jordan, “because we lived just two doors from the church. And he stayed three weeks, until Daddy told him he had to get out. The day after he left Daddy died.” After a moment she added as if she might have sounded irreverent, “There wasn’t any connection.”

194“I used to know a Bill Biloxi from Memphis,” I remarked.

195“That was his cousin. I knew his whole family history before he left. He gave me an aluminium putter that I use today.”

196The music had died down as the ceremony began and now a long cheer floated in at the window, followed by intermittent cries of “Yea—ea—ea!” and finally by a burst of jazz as the dancing began.

197“We’re getting old,” said Daisy. “If we were young we’d rise and dance.”

198“Remember Biloxi,” Jordan warned her. “Where’d you know him, Tom?”

199“Biloxi?” He concentrated with an effort. “I didn’t know him. He was a friend of Daisy’s.”

200“He was not,” she denied. “I’d never seen him before. He came down in the private car.”

201“Well, he said he knew you. He said he was raised in Louisville. Asa Bird brought him around at the last minute and asked if we had room for him.”

202Jordan smiled.

203“He was probably bumming his way home. He told me he was president of your class at Yale.”

204Tom and I looked at each other blankly.

205“Biloxi?”

206“First place, we didn’t have any president—”

207Gatsby’s foot beat a short, restless tattoo and Tom eyed him suddenly.

208“By the way, Mr. Gatsby, I understand you’re an Oxford man.”

209“Not exactly.”

210“Oh, yes, I understand you went to Oxford.”

211“Yes—I went there.”

212A pause. Then Tom’s voice, incredulous and insulting:

213“You must have gone there about the time Biloxi went to New Haven.”

214Another pause. A waiter knocked and came in with crushed mint and ice but the silence was unbroken by his “thank you” and the soft closing of the door. This tremendous detail was to be cleared up at last.

215“I told you I went there,” said Gatsby.

216“I heard you, but I’d like to know when.”

217“It was in nineteen-nineteen, I only stayed five months. That’s why I can’t really call myself an Oxford man.”

218Tom glanced around to see if we mirrored his unbelief. But we were all looking at Gatsby.

219“It was an opportunity they gave to some of the officers after the armistice,” he continued. “We could go to any of the universities in England or France.”

220I wanted to get up and slap him on the back. I had one of those renewals of complete faith in him that I’d experienced before.

221Daisy rose, smiling faintly, and went to the table.

222“Open the whisky, Tom,” she ordered, “and I’ll make you a mint julep. Then you won’t seem so stupid to yourself… Look at the mint!”

223“Wait a minute,” snapped Tom, “I want to ask Mr. Gatsby one more question.”

224“Go on,” Gatsby said politely.

225“What kind of a row are you trying to cause in my house anyhow?”

226They were out in the open at last and Gatsby was content.

227“He isn’t causing a row,” Daisy looked desperately from one to the other. “You’re causing a row. Please have a little self-control.”

228“Self-control!” repeated Tom incredulously. “I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if that’s the idea you can count me out… 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.”

229Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.

230“We’re all white here,” murmured Jordan.

231“I know I’m not very popular. I don’t give big parties. I suppose you’ve got to make your house into a pigsty in order to have any friends—in the modern world.”

232Angry as I was, as we all were, I was tempted to laugh whenever he opened his mouth. The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.

233“I’ve got something to tell you, old sport—” began Gatsby. But Daisy guessed at his intention.

234“Please don’t!” she interrupted helplessly. “Please let’s all go home. Why don’t we all go home?”

235“That’s a good idea,” I got up. “Come on, Tom. Nobody wants a drink.”

236“I want to know what Mr. Gatsby has to tell me.”

237“Your wife doesn’t love you,” said Gatsby. “She’s never loved you. She loves me.”

238“You must be crazy!” exclaimed Tom automatically.

239Gatsby sprang to his feet, vivid with excitement.

240“She never loved you, do you hear?” he cried. “She only married you because I was poor and she was tired of waiting for me. It was a terrible mistake, but in her heart she never loved anyone except me!”

241At this point Jordan and I tried to go, but Tom and Gatsby insisted with competitive firmness that we remain—as though neither of them had anything to conceal and it would be a privilege to partake vicariously of their emotions.

242“Sit down, Daisy,” Tom’s voice groped unsuccessfully for the paternal note. “What’s been going on? I want to hear all about it.”

243“I told you what’s been going on,” said Gatsby. “Going on for five years—and you didn’t know.”

244Tom turned to Daisy sharply.

245“You’ve been seeing this fellow for five years?”

246“Not seeing,” said Gatsby. “No, we couldn’t meet. But both of us loved each other all that time, old sport, and you didn’t know. I used to laugh sometimes”—but there was no laughter in his eyes—“to think that you didn’t know.”

247“Oh—that’s all.” Tom tapped his thick fingers together like a clergyman and leaned back in his chair.

248“You’re crazy!” he exploded. “I can’t speak about what happened five years ago, because I didn’t know Daisy then—and I’ll be damned if I see how you got within a mile of her unless you brought the groceries to the back door. But all the rest of that’s a God damned lie. Daisy loved me when she married me and she loves me now.”

249“No,” said Gatsby, shaking his head.

250“She does, though. The trouble is that sometimes she gets foolish ideas in her head and doesn’t know what she’s doing.” He nodded sagely. “And what’s more, I love Daisy too. Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time.”

251“You’re revolting,” said Daisy. She turned to me, and her voice, dropping an octave lower, filled the room with thrilling scorn: “Do you know why we left Chicago? I’m surprised that they didn’t treat you to the story of that little spree.”

252Gatsby walked over and stood beside her.

253“Daisy, that’s all over now,” he said earnestly. “It doesn’t matter any more. Just tell him the truth—that you never loved him—and it’s all wiped out forever.”

254She looked at him blindly. “Why—how could I love him—possibly?”

255“You never loved him.”

256She hesitated. Her eyes fell on Jordan and me with a sort of appeal, as though she realized at last what she was doing—and as though she had never, all along, intended doing anything at all. But it was done now. It was too late.

257“I never loved him,” she said, with perceptible reluctance.

258“Not at Kapiolani?” demanded Tom suddenly.

259“No.”

260From the ballroom beneath, muffled and suffocating chords were drifting up on hot waves of air.

261“Not that day I carried you down from the Punch Bowl to keep your shoes dry?” There was a husky tenderness in his tone… “Daisy?”

262“Please don’t.” Her voice was cold, but the rancour was gone from it. She looked at Gatsby. “There, Jay,” she said—but her hand as she tried to light a cigarette was trembling. Suddenly she threw the cigarette and the burning match on the carpet.

263“Oh, you want too much!” she cried to Gatsby. “I love you now—isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s past.” She began to sob helplessly. “I did love him once—but I loved you too.”

264Gatsby’s eyes opened and closed.

265“You loved me too?” he repeated.

266“Even that’s a lie,” said Tom savagely. “She didn’t know you were alive. Why—there’s things between Daisy and me that you’ll never know, things that neither of us can ever forget.”

267The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.

268“I want to speak to Daisy alone,” he insisted. “She’s all excited now—”

269“Even alone I can’t say I never loved Tom,” she admitted in a pitiful voice. “It wouldn’t be true.”

270“Of course it wouldn’t,” agreed Tom.

271She turned to her husband.

272“As if it mattered to you,” she said.

273“Of course it matters. I’m going to take better care of you from now on.”

274“You don’t understand,” said Gatsby, with a touch of panic. “You’re not going to take care of her any more.”

275“I’m not?” Tom opened his eyes wide and laughed. He could afford to control himself now. “Why’s that?”

276“Daisy’s leaving you.”

277“Nonsense.”

278“I am, though,” she said with a visible effort.

279“She’s not leaving me!” Tom’s words suddenly leaned down over Gatsby. “Certainly not for a common swindler who’d have to steal the ring he put on her finger.”

280“I won’t stand this!” cried Daisy. “Oh, please let’s get out.”

281“Who are you, anyhow?” broke out Tom. “You’re one of that bunch that hangs around with Meyer Wolfshiem—that much I happen to know. I’ve made a little investigation into your affairs—and I’ll carry it further tomorrow.”

282“You can suit yourself about that, old sport,” said Gatsby steadily.

283“I found out what your ‘drugstores’ were.” He turned to us and spoke rapidly. “He and this Wolfshiem bought up a lot of side-street drugstores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter. That’s one of his little stunts. I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him, and I wasn’t far wrong.”

284“What about it?” said Gatsby politely. “I guess your friend Walter Chase wasn’t too proud to come in on it.”

285“And you left him in the lurch, didn’t you? You let him go to jail for a month over in New Jersey. God! You ought to hear Walter on the subject of you.”

286“He came to us dead broke. He was very glad to pick up some money, old sport.”

287“Don’t you call me ‘old sport’!” cried Tom. Gatsby said nothing. “Walter could have you up on the betting laws too, but Wolfshiem scared him into shutting his mouth.”

288That unfamiliar yet recognizable look was back again in Gatsby’s face.

289“That drugstore business was just small change,” continued Tom slowly, “but you’ve got something on now that Walter’s afraid to tell me about.”

290I glanced at Daisy, who was staring terrified between Gatsby and her husband, and at Jordan, who had begun to balance an invisible but absorbing object on the tip of her chin. Then I turned back to Gatsby—and was startled at his expression. He looked—and this is said in all contempt for the babbled slander of his garden—as if he had “killed a man.” For a moment the set of his face could be described in just that fantastic way.

291It passed, and he began to talk excitedly to Daisy, denying everything, defending his name against accusations that had not been made. But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up, and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room.

292The voice begged again to go.

293“Please, Tom! I can’t stand this any more.”

294Her frightened eyes told that whatever intentions, whatever courage she had had, were definitely gone.

295“You two start on home, Daisy,” said Tom. “In Mr. Gatsby’s car.”

296She looked at Tom, alarmed now, but he insisted with magnanimous scorn.

297“Go on. He won’t annoy you. I think he realizes that his presumptuous little flirtation is over.”

298They were gone, without a word, snapped out, made accidental, isolated, like ghosts, even from our pity.

299After a moment Tom got up and began wrapping the unopened bottle of whisky in the towel.

300“Want any of this stuff? Jordan?… Nick?”

301I didn’t answer.

302“Nick?” He asked again.

303“What?”

304“Want any?”

305“No… I just remembered that today’s my birthday.”

306I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

307It was seven o’clock when we got into the coupé with him and started for Long Island. Tom talked incessantly, exulting and laughing, but his voice was as remote from Jordan and me as the foreign clamour on the sidewalk or the tumult of the elevated overhead. Human sympathy has its limits, and we were content to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind. Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. 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.

308So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

309The young Greek, Michaelis, who ran the coffee joint beside the ash-heaps was the principal witness at the inquest. He had slept through the heat until after five, when he strolled over to the garage, and found George Wilson sick in his office—really sick, pale as his own pale hair and shaking all over. Michaelis advised him to go to bed, but Wilson refused, saying that he’d miss a lot of business if he did. While his neighbour was trying to persuade him a violent racket broke out overhead.

310“I’ve got my wife locked in up there,” explained Wilson calmly. “She’s going to stay there till the day after tomorrow, and then we’re going to move away.”

311Michaelis was astonished; they had been neighbours for four years, and Wilson had never seemed faintly capable of such a statement. Generally he was one of these worn-out men: when he wasn’t working, he sat on a chair in the doorway and stared at the people and the cars that passed along the road. When anyone spoke to him he invariably laughed in an agreeable, colourless way. He was his wife’s man and not his own.

312So naturally Michaelis tried to find out what had happened, but Wilson wouldn’t say a word—instead he began to throw curious, suspicious glances at his visitor and ask him what he’d been doing at certain times on certain days. Just as the latter was getting uneasy, some workmen came past the door bound for his restaurant, and Michaelis took the opportunity to get away, intending to come back later. But he didn’t. He supposed he forgot to, that’s all. When he came outside again, a little after seven, he was reminded of the conversation because he heard Mrs. Wilson’s voice, loud and scolding, downstairs in the garage.

313“Beat me!” he heard her cry. “Throw me down and beat me, you dirty little coward!”