The Great Gatsby Page #14

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan. The novel was inspired by a youthful romance Fitzgerald had with socialite Ginevra King, and the riotous parties he attended on Long Island's North Shore in 1922

• Fiction
• Novel

								

Mr. Chrystie’s wife), and Edgar Beaver, whose hair, they say, turned
cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all.

Clarence Endive was from East Egg, as I remember. He came only once,
in white knickerbockers, and had a fight with a bum named Etty in the
garden. From farther out on the Island came the Cheadles and the O.
R. P. Schraeders, and the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of Georgia, and the
Fishguards and the Ripley Snells. Snell was there three days before he
went to the penitentiary, so drunk out on the gravel drive that
Mrs. Ulysses Swett’s automobile ran over his right hand. The Dancies
came, too, and S. B. Whitebait, who was well over sixty, and Maurice
A. Flink, and the Hammerheads, and Beluga the tobacco importer, and
Beluga’s girls.

From West Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys and Cecil Roebuck and
Cecil Schoen and Gulick the State senator and Newton Orchid, who
controlled Films Par Excellence, and Eckhaust and Clyde Cohen and Don
S. Schwartz (the son) and Arthur McCarty, all connected with the
movies in one way or another. And the Catlips and the Bembergs and G.
Earl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon who afterward strangled his
wife. 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.

A man named Klipspringer was there so often that he became known as
“the boarder”—I doubt if he had any other home. Of theatrical people
there were Gus Waize and Horace O’Donavan and Lester Myer and George
Duckweed and Francis Bull. Also from New York were the Chromes and the
Backhyssons and the Dennickers and Russel Betty and the Corrigans and
the Kellehers and the Dewars and the Scullys and S. W. Belcher and the
Smirkes and the young Quinns, divorced now, and Henry L. Palmetto, who
killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square.

Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls. They were never quite
the same ones in physical person, but they were so identical one with
another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before. I have
forgotten their names—Jaqueline, I think, or else Consuela, or Gloria
or Judy or June, and their last names were either the melodious names
of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American
capitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves
to be.

In addition to all these I can remember that Faustina O’Brien came
there at least once and the Baedeker girls and young Brewer, who had
his nose shot off in the war, and Mr. Albrucksburger and Miss Haag,
his fiancée, and Ardita Fitz-Peters and Mr. P. Jewett, once head of
the American Legion, and Miss Claudia Hip, with a man reputed to be
her chauffeur, and a prince of something, whom we called Duke, and
whose name, if I ever knew it, I have forgotten.

All these people came to Gatsby’s house in the summer.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

At nine o’clock, one morning late in July, Gatsby’s gorgeous car
lurched up the rocky drive to my door and gave out a burst of melody
from its three-noted horn.

It was the first time he had called on me, though I had gone to two of
his parties, mounted in his hydroplane, and, at his urgent invitation,
made frequent use of his beach.

“Good morning, old sport. You’re having lunch with me today and I
thought we’d ride up together.”

He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that
resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American—that comes,
I suppose, with the absence of lifting work in youth and, even more,
with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games. This quality
was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape
of restlessness. He was never quite still; there was always a tapping
foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand.

He saw me looking with admiration at his car.

“It’s pretty, isn’t it, old sport?” He jumped off to give me a better
view. “Haven’t you ever seen it before?”

I’d seen it. Everybody had seen it. It was a rich cream colour, bright
with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with
triumphant hatboxes and supper-boxes and toolboxes, and terraced with
a labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down
behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory,
we started to town.

I had talked with him perhaps half a dozen times in the past month and
found, to my disappointment, that he had little to say. So my first
impression, that he was a person of some undefined consequence, had
gradually faded and he had become simply the proprietor of an
elaborate roadhouse next door.

And then came that disconcerting ride. We hadn’t reached West Egg
village before Gatsby began leaving his elegant sentences unfinished
and slapping himself indecisively on the knee of his caramel-coloured
suit.

“Look here, old sport,” he broke out surprisingly, “what’s your
opinion of me, anyhow?”

A little overwhelmed, I began the generalized evasions which that
question deserves.

“Well, I’m going to tell you something about my life,” he interrupted.
“I don’t want you to get a wrong idea of me from all these stories you
hear.”

So he was aware of the bizarre accusations that flavoured conversation
in his halls.

“I’ll tell you God’s truth.” His right hand suddenly ordered divine
retribution to stand by. “I am the son of some wealthy people in the
Middle West—all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at
Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many
years. It is a family tradition.”

He looked at me sideways—and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he
was lying. He hurried the phrase “educated at Oxford,” or swallowed
it, or choked on it, as though it had bothered him before. And with
this doubt, his whole statement fell to pieces, and I wondered if
there wasn’t something a little sinister about him, after all.

“What part of the Middle West?” I inquired casually.

“San Francisco.”

“I see.”

“My family all died and I came into a good deal of money.”

His voice was solemn, as if the memory of that sudden extinction of a
clan still haunted him. For a moment I suspected that he was pulling
my leg, but a glance at him convinced me otherwise.

“After that I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of
Europe—Paris, Venice, Rome—collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting
big game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to
forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago.”

With an effort I managed to restrain my incredulous laughter. The very
phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that
of a turbaned “character” leaking sawdust at every pore as he pursued
a tiger through the Bois de Boulogne.

“Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very
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