She was the first “nice” girl he had ever known. In various unrevealed capacities he had come in contact with such people but always with indiscernible barbed-wire between. He found her excitingly desirable. He went to her house, at first with other officers, then alone. He was amazed at it—he had never been in such a beautiful house before. But what gave it an air of breathless intensity was that Daisy lived there—it was as casual a thing to her as was his tent out at camp to him. There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its corridors and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year’s shining motorcars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered. It excited him too that many men had already loved Daisy—it increased her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions.
But he knew that he was in Daisy’s house by a colossal accident. He knew that he was a nobody with an irrevealable past and that at any moment the invisible cloak of his uniform might slip from his shoulders. So he made the most of his time. He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously—eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand.
He might have despised himself, for he had certainly taken her under false pretenses. I don’t mean that in this case he had claimed to be the son of a millionaire, but he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he let her believe that he was a person from much the same strata as herself—that he was fully able to take care of her. As a matter of fact he had no such facilities—he had no comfortable family standing behind him and he was liable at the whim of an impersonal government to be blown anywhere about the world.
But he didn’t despise himself—it didn’t turn out as he had imagined. He had intended, probably, to take what he could and go—but now he found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail. He knew that Daisy was extraordinary but he didn’t realize just how extraordinary a “nice” girl could be. She vanished into her rich house, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby—nothing. He felt married to her, that was all.
When they met again two days later it was Gatsby who was breathless, who was somehow betrayed. Her porch was bright with the bought luxury of star-shine; the wicker of the settee squeaked fashionably as she turned toward him and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth. She had caught a cold and made her voice huskier and more charming than ever and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware only of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.
“I can’t describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her. I felt as if there’d been a trick played on me. I went and told her part of the truth, sort of hoping that she’d throw me over—but it didn’t make any difference, because she was in love with me too. She seemed to think I knew a lot about life, and it was just because I knew different things from her. Then we took that walk together one night, and suddenly I decided that she was what my dreams had been about all along. That made it all right. I thought out my life over again with Daisy in it, trying to figure how we could marry and struggle along on so many dollars a month. I didn’t want to be great any more because I wouldn’t admit to myself that there could be anything better than having her. What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do, while I held her in my arms?”
On the last afternoon before he went abroad, he sat with Daisy in his lap for a long, silent time. It was a cold fall day with fire in the room and her cheeks flushed. Now and then she moved and he changed his arm a little and once he kissed her dark shining hair. The afternoon had made them tranquil for awhile as if to give them rest for whatever sadness the next day promised. They had never been closer in their month of love nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat’s shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.
He did well in the war. He was a captain before he went to the front and after the Argonne battles he got his majority and the command of the divisional machine guns. He had an instinct for the business and in a long war he might have gone far. After the armistice he tried frantically to get home but some complication or misunderstanding sent him to Oxford instead. He was worried now—there was a quality of nervous despair in Daisy’s letters. She didn’t see why he couldn’t come. She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.
For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes. All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the “Beale Street Blues” while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the grey tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor.
Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed. And all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately—and the decision must be made by some force—of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality—that was close at hand.
That force took shape in the middle of spring with the arrival of Tom Buchanan. There was a wholesome bulkiness about his person and his position and Daisy was flattered. Doubtless there was a certain struggle and a certain relief. The letter reached Gatsby while he was still at Oxford.
It was dawn now on Long Island and we went about opening the rest of the windows downstairs, filling the house with grey-turning, gold-turning light. The ghostly shadow of a tree fell abruptly across the dew and birds began to sing a little among the blue leaves. There was a slow pleasant movement in the air, scarcely a wind, promising a cool lovely day.
“It was almost a year before I managed to beat it into my head that I couldn’t have her,” went on Gatsby quietly, “but I convinced myself at last. I used to be glad that I wasn’t in society, old sport, because I never ran into anyone who knew her or was liable to mention her name.”
Once he had to go to Louisville on business; he stayed there a week walking the streets where their footsteps had clicked together through the November night and revisiting the quiet, out-of-the-way places where they had driven in her white car. Just as Daisy’s house had always seemed to him more mysterious and gay than other houses so his idea of the city itself, even though she was gone from it, was pervaded with a melancholy beauty.
He left feeling that if he had searched harder he might have found her—that he was leaving her behind. The Pullman car was hot. He went out to the open vestibule and sat down on the porter’s folding chair and the station slid away and the backs of unfamiliar buildings moved by. Then out into the spring fields, where a yellow trolley raced them for a minute with people in it who might once have seen the pale magic of her face along the casual street.
The track curved and now it was going away from the sun which, as it sank lower, seemed to spread itself in benediction over the vanishing city where she had drawn her breath. He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.
It was nine o’clock when we finished breakfast and went out on the porch. The night had made a sharp difference in
