“I think you’re probably nervous,” said Gatsby. “She’s just having a good time.” He hesitated. “I don’t know what’s the matter tonight; very few people seem to be enjoying themselves.”
Her wandering eyes caught his and perceived his disappointment.
“Why, they are, Jay,” she cried quickly. “Everybody’s having a wonderful time. Have I said something that you—here——!”
With her little gold pencil she wrote an address on the tablecloth. “There’s where I get my hair cut. Is that what she wanted to know?”
But there was no such intimacy between them as would allow them to criticize each other’s friends. Gatsby took out his pencil and slowly obliterated her markings with his own.
At one o’clock we sat on the moonlit front steps waiting for Gatsby to come and say goodbye.
“Who is our host anyhow?” inquired Tom. “Some big boot-legger?”
“Be quiet!” Daisy warned him sharply. “You have no reason for talking like that.”
“Well—” Tom yawned placidly, “he certainly went into the highways and byways to get this crowd together.”
“At least they accomplish something. They’re more interesting than—the people we see.”
“You didn’t look so interested.”
“Well, I was,” she asserted stoutly. “I was having a marvellous time.”
Tom laughed scoffingly.
“Did you see Daisy’s face when that girl wanted her to put her to bed?”
Daisy began to sing in a low voice, resolutely disregarding him; then, frowning, she broke off and made a sudden attempt to separate Gatsby from his party.
“Lots of people come who haven’t been invited,” she said. “He told me so himself. That girl who was so—so funny hadn’t been invited. They simply force their way in and he’s too kind to object.” She hesitated. “Of course he’s much nicer than the people he entertains.”
“He’s just like them,” said Tom.
“Be quiet!”
Gatsby was coming down the steps. With exaggerated enthusiasm Daisy thanked him for their good time.
“I suppose it’ll last quite late,” she said.
“Oh, yes. Some time longer.”
She got into the limousine.
“Good night——” Her lips formed the word “dear,” her fingers just brushed the back of his hand. Tom, his eyes closed sleepily, was already leaning back in a corner of the car.
“Good night,” repeated Daisy. Her glance left Gatsby and sought the lighted top of the steps where a contralto song was drifting out the open door. After all in the very casualness of Gatsby’s party there were romantic possibilities totally absent from her world. What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling him back inside? What would happen now in the dim, incalculable hours? Perhaps some unbelievable guest would -a person infinitely rare and to be marvelled at, who would arrive never be seen anywhere again… or perhaps 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.
As the car moved off a flush of apprehension made her stretch out her hand, trying to touch his once more.
CHAPTER VII
It was about this time that an ambitious young reporter from New York arrived at Gatsby’s door one morning and asked him if he had anything to say.
“Anything to say about what?” inquired Gatsby politely.
“Why—any statement to give out.”
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. It was his day off and with laudable initiative he had hurried out “to see.”
It was an accident, and yet the reporter’s instinct was right. Gatsby’s notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his hospitality and thus become authorities on his past, had increased all summer until he fell just short of being news. 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. It was when curiosity was at the highest about him that his lights failed to go on one Saturday night—and as obscurely as it had begun his career as Trimalchio suddenly ended.
For several weeks I hadn’t seen him and I perceived gradually that the automobiles that turned expectantly into his drive stayed only a minute and then drove rather sulkily away. Wondering if he were ill I went over to find out—an unfamiliar butler with a villainous face squinted at me suspiciously from the open door.
“Is Mr. Gatsby ill?”
“Nope,” he answered, adding “sir” in a dilatory, grudging way.
“I hadn’t seen him and I was rather worried. Tell him Mr. Carraway came over from next door.”
“Who?” he demanded rudely.
“Carraway.”
“Carraway. All right, I’ll tell him.”
Abruptly he slammed the door.
It was my Finn who 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 the village and who never exchanged a word with the tradesmen except to order 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.
After that I watched for Gatsby, and found him several evenings later, coming across my own lawn. He had lost a little of his tan and his eyes were bright and tired. We sat down on a bench in the yard.
“Going away?” I asked.
“No, old sport. Why?”
“I hear you fired all your servants.”
He hesitated.
“Daisy comes over sometimes in the afternoon. And I wanted some people who wouldn’t gossip—until we decide what we’re going to do. These two towns are pretty close together.”
“Where’d you find these?” I inquired, determined to show no curiosity about Daisy.
“They’re some people Wolfshiem wanted to do something for,” he said vaguely. “They’re all brothers and sisters—they used to run a small hotel. What’s the difference, so long as they can cook and make beds?”
This was a new note from Gatsby, whose household had been exemplary in its own extravagant way.
“You’re depressed,” I remarked.
“I’m very sad, old sport.” He hesitated. “Daisy wants us to run off together. She came over this afternoon with a suitcase all packed and ready in the car.” Gatsby shook his head wearily. “I tried to explain to her that we couldn’t do that, and I only made her cry.”
“In other words you’ve got her—and now you don’t want her.”
“Of course I want her,” he exclaimed in horror. “Why—Daisy’s all I’ve got left from a world so wonderful that to think of it makes me sick all over.” He looked around him in wild regret. “But we mustn’t just run away like we might have done five years ago,” he said after a pause. “That won’t do at all.”
He seemed to feel that Daisy should make some sort of atonement that would give her love the value that it had before. Anyone might have come along in a few years and taken her away from Tom—he wanted this to have an element of fate about it, of inevitability—the resumption of an interrupted dance. And first Daisy must purify herself by a renunciation of the years between.
“But how can she do that?” I asked, puzzled.
“She can go to her husband and tell him that she never loved him. She can set that much right. Then we can go back to Louisville and be married in her house and start life over.”
He jumped up and began walking back and forth frantically, as if the past that he wanted to repeat were lurking here under the very shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand. His impassioned sentimentality possessed him so thoroughly that he seemed to be in some fantastic communication with space and time—and they must have given him his answer then and there in the moonlight, for he sat down suddenly and put his face in his hands and began to sob.
“I beg your pardon, old sport,” he said chokingly, “but it’s all so sad because I can’t make her understand.”
I began patting him idiotically on the back, and presently he sat back and began to stare at his house.
“She even wants to leave that,” he said bitterly. “I’ve gotten these things for her, and now she wants to run away.”
“Take what you can get, Gatsby,” I urged him. “Daisy’s a person—she’s not just a figure in your dream. And she probably doesn’t feel that she owes you anything at all.”
“She does, though. Why—I’m only thirty-two. I might be a great man if I could forget that once I lost Daisy. But my career has got to be like this——” He drew a slanting line from the lawn to the stars. “It’s got to keep going up. I used to think wonderful things were going to happen to me, before I met her. And I knew it was a great mistake for a man like me to fall in love—and then one night I let myself go, and it was too late——”
They had been walking together down the street one autumn night five years ago when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out in the darkness and there was a sort of stir
