The Great Gatsby Page #17

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

								

Cross to make bandages. I was. Well, then, would I tell them that she
couldn’t come that day? The officer looked at Daisy while she was
speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at
sometime, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the
incident ever since. His name was Jay Gatsby, and I didn’t lay eyes on
him again for over four years—even after I’d met him on Long Island I
didn’t realize it was the same man.

That was nineteen-seventeen. By the next year I had a few beaux
myself, and I began to play in tournaments, so I didn’t see Daisy very
often. She went with a slightly older crowd—when she went with anyone
at all. Wild rumours were circulating about her—how her mother had
found her packing her bag one winter night to go to New York and say
goodbye to a soldier who was going overseas. She was effectually
prevented, but she wasn’t on speaking terms with her family for
several weeks. After that she didn’t play around with the soldiers any
more, but only with a few flat-footed, shortsighted young men in town,
who couldn’t get into the army at all.

By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever. She had a début
after the armistice, and in February she was presumably engaged to a
man from New Orleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago,
with more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before. He
came down with a hundred people in four private cars, and hired a
whole floor of the Muhlbach Hotel, and the day before the wedding he
gave her a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand
dollars.

I was a bridesmaid. I came into her room half an hour before the
bridal dinner, and found her lying on her bed as lovely as the June
night in her flowered dress—and as drunk as a monkey. She had a bottle
of Sauterne in one hand and a letter in the other.

“ ’Gratulate me,” she muttered. “Never had a drink before, but oh how
I do enjoy it.”

“What’s the matter, Daisy?”

I was scared, I can tell you; I’d never seen a girl like that before.

“Here, dearies.” She groped around in a wastebasket she had with her
on the bed and pulled out the string of pearls. “Take ’em downstairs
and give ’em back to whoever they belong to. Tell ’em all Daisy’s
change’ her mine. Say: ‘Daisy’s change’ her mine!’ ”

She began to cry—she cried and cried. I rushed out and found her
mother’s maid, and we locked the door and got her into a cold bath.
She wouldn’t let go of the letter. She took it into the tub with her
and squeezed it up in a wet ball, and only let me leave it in the
soap-dish when she saw that it was coming to pieces like snow.

But she didn’t say another word. We gave her spirits of ammonia and
put ice on her forehead and hooked her back into her dress, and half
an hour later, when we walked out of the room, the pearls were around
her neck and the incident was over. Next day at five o’clock she
married Tom Buchanan without so much as a shiver, and started off on a
three months’ trip to the South Seas.

I saw them in Santa Barbara when they came back, and I thought I’d
never seen a girl so mad about her husband. If he left the room for a
minute she’d look around uneasily, and say: “Where’s Tom gone?” and
wear the most abstracted expression until she saw him coming in the
door. She used to sit on the sand with his head in her lap by the
hour, rubbing her fingers over his eyes and looking at him with
unfathomable delight. It was touching to see them together—it made you
laugh in a hushed, fascinated way. That was in August. A week after I
left Santa Barbara Tom ran into a wagon on the Ventura road one night,
and ripped a front wheel off his car. The girl who was with him got
into the papers, too, because her arm was broken—she was one of the
chambermaids in the Santa Barbara Hotel.

The next April Daisy had her little girl, and they went to France for
a year. I saw them one spring in Cannes, and later in Deauville, and
then they came back to Chicago to settle down. Daisy was popular in
Chicago, as you know. They moved with a fast crowd, all of them young
and rich and wild, but she came out with an absolutely perfect
reputation. Perhaps because she doesn’t drink. It’s a great advantage
not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and,
moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that
everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care. Perhaps Daisy
never went in for amour at all—and yet there’s something in that voice
of hers …

Well, about six weeks ago, she heard the name Gatsby for the first
time in years. It was when I asked you—do you remember?—if you knew
Gatsby in West Egg. After you had gone home she came into my room and
woke me up, and said: “What Gatsby?” and when I described him—I was
half asleep—she said in the strangest voice that it must be the man
she used to know. It wasn’t until then that I connected this Gatsby
with the officer in her white car.

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

When Jordan Baker had finished telling all this we had left the Plaza
for half an hour and were driving in a victoria through Central Park.
The sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in
the West Fifties, and the clear voices of children, already gathered
like crickets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight:

 “I’m the Sheik of Araby. Your love belongs to me. At night when
 you’re asleep Into your tent I’ll creep—”

“It was a strange coincidence,” I said.

“But it wasn’t a coincidence at all.”

“Why not?”

“Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay.”

Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that
June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of
his purposeless splendour.

“He wants to know,” continued Jordan, “if you’ll invite Daisy to your
house some afternoon and then let him come over.”

The modesty of the demand shook me. He had waited five years and
bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths—so that
he could “come over” some afternoon to a stranger’s garden.

“Did I have to know all this before he could ask such a little thing?”

“He’s afraid, he’s waited so long. He thought you might be
offended. You see, he’s regular tough underneath it all.”

Something worried me.

“Why didn’t he ask you to arrange a meeting?”

“He wants her to see his house,” she explained. “And your house is
right next door.”

“Oh!”

“I think he half expected her to wander into one of his parties, some
night,” went on Jordan, “but she never did. Then he began asking
people casually if they knew her, and I was the first one he found. It
was that night he sent for me at his dance, and you should have heard
the elaborate way he worked up to it. Of course, I immediately
suggested a luncheon in New York—and I thought he’d go mad:

“ ‘I don’t want to do anything out of the way!’ he kept saying. ‘I
want to see her right next door.’

								Rate this book:5.0 / 1 vote