“And the day I carried you all the way down from the Punch Bowl in my arms because you wanted to keep your shoes out of the rain——
“I want to speak to you alone, Daisy,” interrupted Gatsby quickly. “You’re all excited——”
The sudden panic which made him willing to take her on her own terms, to run off with her tonight, was visible in his face. He was telling her that with every word and she knew it. But her courage was gone.
“You want too much,” she said in a pitiful voice. “I can’t say I never loved Tom. It wouldn’t be true.”
“Why there are things between Daisy and me that you’ll never know,” said Tom, “things that neither of us will forget.”
Gatsby kept looking at Daisy.
“I don’t ask you to say anything. I only want you, Daisy.” She didn’t answer and he turned miserably to Tom. “She never loved you. I have a way—I have reasons for knowing she never loved you. Good reasons. She only married you because you were rich and she was tired.”
Those tragic eyes of Gatsby’s were the criterion of Tom’s triumph but the dead dream fought on while the afternoon slipped away, striving to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room.
“She’s never stopped loving me,” said Tom and his words seemed to lean down over Gatsby. “Certainly not for a common swindler who’d have to steal the ring he put on her finger.”
But Gatsby was too stunned to hear or care and Tom, who wasn’t a bully except when he was drunk, saw that he had gone far enough. He could be magnanimous, and a little contemptuous now——
“It’s pretty late. You two start on home”—he indicated his wife and Gatsby—“in the circus—in Mr. Gatsby’s car. You wanted to talk to her and here’s your chance. But I think you understand now that you’re talking to my wife.”
They were gone, with scarcely a word, with Daisy’s inattributable tears. After a moment Tom got up and began wrapping the unopened bottle of whiskey in a towel.
“Want any of this stuff? Nick?… Jordan?”
“No thanks.”
He looked at me, a little wistfully.
“Mr. Gatsby seemed unhappy,” he remarked.
“What’s that?”
“Weren’t you listening?”
“I just remembered this is my birthday.”
I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous menacing road of a new decade.
It was seven o’clock by my watch when we got into the coupe with him and started for Long Island. Tom talked incessantly, boasting and laughing, but his voice was as remote as the voices of children on the sidewalk or the tumult of the elevated overheard. Jordan and I were driving out into the fresh country together and their tragic arguments were fading with the city lights behind. Thirty—a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning assortment of illusions, thinning hair. As we passed over the dark, silky bridge all that remained to be said between Jordan and me was said in a whisper and the pressure of a hand.
So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.
The 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 paste 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 neighbor was trying to persuade him a violent racket broke out overhead.
“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.”
Michaelis was astonished; they had been neighbors for four years and Wilson had never seemed faintly capable of such a statement. Generally he was one of these wornout 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, colorless way. He was his wife’s man and not his own.
So 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 he took the opportunity to get away, intending to come back later. But he never did. He didn’t know why he didn’t, he supposed he forgot it, that’s all. When he came outside again a little after seven he was reminded of it because he heard Mrs. Wilson’s voice, loud and scolding, downstairs in the garage.
“Beat me!” he heard her cry. “Throw me down and beat me, you dirty little coward!”
A moment later he saw her rush out into the dusk, waving her hands and shouting; before he could move from his door the business was over.
The “death car,” as the newspapers called it, didn’t stop; it came -out of the gathering darkness, wavered tragically for a moment and then disappeared around the next bend. Michaelis wasn’t even sure of its color—he told the first policeman that it was light green. The other car, the one going toward New York, came to rest a hundred yards beyond, and the driver hurried back to where Myrtle Wilson, her life violently extinguished, knelt in the road and mingled her thick, dark blood with the dust.
Michaelis and this man reached her first but when they had torn open her shirtwaist still damp with perspiration they saw that her left breast was swinging loose like a flap and there was no need to listen for the heart beneath. The mouth was wide open and ripped a little at the corners as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.
We saw the three or four automobiles and the crowd when we were still some distance away.
“Wreck!” said Tom. “That’s good. Wilson’ll have a little business at last.”
He slowed down, but still without any intention of stopping until, as we came nearer, the hushed intent faces of the people at the garage door made him half unconsciously put on the brakes.
“We’ll take a look,” he said doubtfully, “just a look.”
I became aware now of a gasping, moaning sound which issued incessantly from the garage, a sound which as we got out of the coupe and walked toward the door resolved itself into a hollow wail of “Oh, my God!” uttered over and over.
“There’s some bad trouble here,” said Tom excitedly.
He reached up on tiptoes and peered over a circle of heads into the garage, which was lit only by a yellow light in a swinging metal basket overhead. Then he made a harsh husky sound in his throat and with a violent, thrusting movement of his powerful arms pushed his way through.
The circle closed up again and there was a running murmur of expostulation; it was a minute before I could see anything at all. Then new arrivals disarranged the line, and Jordan and I were pushed suddenly inside.
Myrtle Wilson’s body, wrapped in a blanket and then in another blanket as though she suffered from a chill in the hot night, lay on a work table by the wall and Tom, with his back to us, was bending over it, motionless. Next to him stood a motorcycle policeman taking down names with much sweat and correction in a little book. At first I couldn’t find the source of the high, groaning words that echoed clamorously through the bare garage—then I saw Wilson standing on the raised threshold of his office, swaying back and forth and holding to the doorposts with both hands. Some man was talking to him in a low voice and attempting from time to time to lay a hand on his shoulder, but Wilson neither heard nor saw. His eyes would drop slowly from the swinging light to the laden table by the wall and then jerk back to the light again and he gave out incessantly his high horrible call:
“O my Ga-od! O my Ga-od! O Ga-od! O my Ga-od!”
Presently Tom lifted his head with a jerk and after staring around the garage with glazed eyes addressed a mumbled incoherent remark to the policeman.
“M-a-v—” the policeman was saying, “—o—”
“No, —r—” corrected the man, “M-a-v-r-o—”
“Listen to me!” muttered Tom fiercely.
“R—” said the policeman, “o—”
“G—”
“G—” He looked up as Tom’s broad hand fell sharply on his shoulder. “What you want, fella?”
“What happened?—that’s what I want to know.”
“Auto hit her. In’santly killed.”
“Instantly killed,” repeated Tom, staring.
“She ran out ina road. Son of a bitch didn’t even stop’z car.”
“There was two cars,” said Michaelis. “One comin’, one goin’, see?”
“Going where?” asked the policeman keenly.
“One goin’ each way. Well, she—” his hand rose toward the blankets but stopped halfway and fell to his side, “—she ran out there an’ the one comin’ from N’York knock right into her goin’ thirty or forty miles an hour.”
“What’s the name of this place here?” demanded the officer.
“Hasn’t got any name.”
A pale well dressed negro stepped near.
“It was a yellow car,” he said. “Big yellow car. New.”
“See the accident?” asked the policeman.
“No, but the car passed me down the road, going faster’n forty. Going fifty, sixty.”
“Come here and let’s have your name. Look out now. I want
