The Great Gatsby - Chapter 01

Chapter one of the Great Gatsby. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Once again, tis Zelda, Then where the gold hat? If that will move her? If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, till she cry, lover, gold hatted, high bouncing lover, I must have you, Thomas Parke d'anvilliers, chapter one. In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in

my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had. He didn't say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim

of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician. Because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought. Frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering

on the horizon. For the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they expressed them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth. And after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come

to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn, I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever. I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this

book, was exempt from my reaction. Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that

flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the creative temperament. It was an extraordinary gift for hope or romantic readiness, such as I have never found in any other person, and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No Gatsby turned out all right at the end. It is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams, that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short winded elations of

men. My family have been prominent, well to do people in this middlewestern city for three generations. The carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Bucclu. But the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother, who came here in fifty one, sent us substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business

that my father carries on today. I never saw this great uncle, but I'm supposed to look like him, with special reference to the rather hard boiled painting that hangs in father's office. I graduated from Newhaven in nineteen fifteen, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the

counter raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like a ragged edge of the universe. So I decided to go east and learned the bond business.

Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, why yes, with very grave hesitant faces father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays, I came east permanently. I thought in the spring of twenty two the practical thing was to find rooms in the city. But it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide

lawns and friendly trees. So when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old dodge, and a finishwoman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish

wisdom to herself over the electric stove. It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man more recently arrived than I stopped me on the road. How do you get to West Egg Village, he asked, helplessly. I told him, And as I walked on, I was lonely. No longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler.

He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood. And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young,

breath giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf and reading gold, like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and messinists knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books. Besides, I was rather literary in college. One year I wrote

a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News. And now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the well rounded man. This isn't just an epigram. Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window. After all, it was a matter of chance that I should have rented a

house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender, riotous island, which extends itself due east of New York, and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land twenty miles from the city. A pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet Barnyard of Long Island Sound.

They are not perfect ovals, like the egg in the Columbus story. They are both crushed flat at the contact end, but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual wonder to the gulls that fly overhead to the wingless. A more interesting phenomena is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size. I lived at West Egg, the well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bazaar, and

not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the Egg, only fifty yards from the sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard. It was a factual imitation of some hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool,

and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby's mansion, or rather, as I didn't know mister Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked. So I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires, all for eighty dollars a month. Across the courtesy bay, the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water,

and the history of the summer really begins. On the evening I drove

over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin, once removed, and I had known Tom in college, and just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago, her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven, a national figure in a way, one of those men who reached such an acute limited excellence at twenty one that everything afterwards savors

of anti climax. His family were enormously wealthy. Even in college, his freedom with money was a matter for reproach. But now he'd left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away. For instance, he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that. Why they came east, I don't know. They had spent a year

in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully, wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone. But I didn't believe it. I had no sight into Daisy's heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever, seeking a little wistfully for that dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game. And so it happened that on a warm windy evening, I drove over to East

Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful, red and white Georgian colonial mansion overlooking the bay. The lawns started at the beach and ran towards the door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun dials and brick walks and burning gardens. Finally, when it reached the house, drifting up the side in bright vines, as though from the momentum of its run.

The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm, windy afternoon. And Tom Buchanan, in riding clothes, was standing with his legs apart on the front porch. He had changed since his new Haven years. Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty, with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him

the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body. He seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under the thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage, a cruel body. His speaking voice, a gruff, husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness. He

conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked, and there were men in Newhaven who had hated his guts. Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final, he seemed to say, just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are. We were in the same senior society, and while we were never intimate, I always had the impression that he had approved of me and wanted me to like him, with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own. We talked

for a few minutes on the sunny porch. I've got a nice place here, he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly. Turning me around by one arm, he moved a broad, flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep, pungent roses, and a snub nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore. It belonged to Domaine, the oil man. He turned me around again,

politely and abruptly. We'll go inside. He walked through a high hallway into a bright, rosy colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass

outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea. The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an

anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering, as if they had just been blown back in. After a short flight around the house, I must have stood for a few moments listening to the wisp and snap of the curtains, and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows, and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs, and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor. The younger

of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless, and with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it, which was quite likely to fall if she saw me out of the corner of her eyes. She gave no hint of it. Indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in. The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise. She leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression.

Then she laughed an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too, and came forward into the room. I'm pa paralyzed with happiness. She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see that was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker.

I've heard it said that Daisy's murmur was only to make people lean toward her, an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming at any rate. Miss Baker's lips fluttered. She nodded at me, almost imperceptibly, and then quickly tipped her head back again. The object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again, a sort of apology arose to my lips, almost an exhibition of complete self sufficiency draws a

stun tribute from me. I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely, with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright, passionate mouth.

But there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget, a singing compulsion, a whispered listen I promise that she had done gay exciting things just a while since, and that there were gay exciting things hovering in the next hour. I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way east, and how a dozen people had sent their love through me. Do they miss me?

She cried ecstatically. The whole town is desolate. All the cars have left, rear wheel painted black as a morning wreath, and there's a persistent whale all night along the north shore. How gorgeous. Let's go back tom tomorrow. Then she added, irrelevantly. You ought to see the baby, I'd like to She's asleep. She's three years old. Haven't you ever seen her? Never? Well, you ought to see her. She's Tom Buchanan, who had been hovering restlessly about the room, stopped and rested his hand on

my shoulder. What are you doing, Nick, I'm a bondman who with I told him, never heard of them, he remarked decisively. This annoyed me. You will, I answered shortly. You will if you stay in the east. Oh, I stay in the East. Don't you worry, he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. I'd be a goddamn fool to live anywhere else. At this point, Miss Baker said absolutely, with such sudden as that

I started. It was the first word she had uttered since I came into the room. Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room. I'm stiff, she complained. I've been lying on that sofa as long as I can remember. Don't look at me, Daisy retorted, I've been trying to get you to New York all afternoon. No thanks, said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in front of the pantry. I'm absolutely

in training. Her host looked at her incredulously. You are, He took down his drink, as if it were a drop in the bottom of glass. How you ever get anything done is beyond me. I looked at Miss Baker, wondering what it was she got done. I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small breasted girl with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her gray sunstrained eyes looked back at me with polite, reciprocal curiosity out of

a low, charming, discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her somewhere before. You live in the West, egg, she remarked, contemptuously. I know somebody there. I don't know a single You must know Gatsby. Gatsby, demanded Daisy,

what Gatsby? Before I could reply that he was my neighbor, dinner was announced, wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine, Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square, slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips, the two young women preceded us out onto the rosy colored porch opened toward the sunset, where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind. Why candles, objected Daisy,

frowning, she snapped them out with her fingers. In two weeks, it'll be the longest day in the year, She looked at us all radiantly. Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year, and then Miss it, we ought to plan something, yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed. All right, said Daisy, what'll we plan? She turned to me helplessly, what do people plan?

Before I could answer, her eyes fastened with an odd expression on her little finger look. She complained, I heard it. We all looked. The knuckle was black and blue. You did it, Tom, she said, accusingly. I know you didn't mean to, but you did do it. That's what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great, big, hulking physical specimen of a I hate that word hulking, objected

Tom crossly. Even in kitting hulking, insisted Daisy. Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering in consequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes. In the absence of all desire. They were here, and they accepted Tom and me making only a polite, pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that presently dinner would be over, and a little later

the evening too would be over, and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West, where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close in a continually disappointed anticipation, or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself. You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy, I confessed, on my second glass of corky but rather impressive, Claret, Can you talk about crops or something? I meant nothing in particular by this remark, but

it was taken up in an unexpected way. Civilization's going to pieces, broke out Tom violently. I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard? Why no, I answered, rather surprised by his tone. Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is, if we don't look out, the white race will be utterly submerged. It's all signed typic stuff. It's been proved. Tom's getting very profound, said Daisy,

with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word? We will? These books are all scientific, insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out, or these other races will have control of things. We've got to beat them down, whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.

You ought to live in California, began Miss Baker, but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair. This idea is that were Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are. And after an infinitesimal hesitation, he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again. And we've produced all the things that go to make civilization old, science and art and all that. Do you see? There was something pathetic in his concentration, as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was

not enough to him anymore. When almost immediately the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch, Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned towards me. I'll tell you a little family's secret, she whispered, enthusiastically. It's about the butler's nose. Do you want to hear about the butler's nose. Well, that's why I came over tonight. Well, he wasn't always a butler. He used to be the silver polisher for some people in New York

that had a silver service for two hundred people. He had to polish it from morning till night, until finally it began to affect his nose. Things went from bad to worse, suggested Miss Baker. Yes, things went from bad to worse until finally he had to give up his position for a moment. The last sunshine fell with a romantic affection upon her glowing face. Her

voice held me forward breathlessly as I listened. Then the glow faded, each light, deserting her with a lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street. At dusk, the butler came back and murmured something close to Tom's ear, whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair, and without a word, went inside. As if his absence quickened something within her, Daisy leaned forward again, her voice glowing and singing, I love to see you at my

table. Nick, you remind me of a rose, an absolute rose, doesn't he? She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation, an absolute rose. This was untrue. I'm not even faintly like a rose. She was only extemporizing, but a stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you, concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and excused herself and

went into the house. Miss and I exchanged a short glance, consciously devoid of meaning. I was about to speak, when she sat up alertly and said shi in a warning voice. A subdued, impassioned murmur was audible in the room beyond, and Miss Baker leaned forward, unashamed, trying to hear the murmur, trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether. Now this, mister Gadsby, you spoke of as my neighbor. I began, don't talk. I want to hear what

happens. Is something happening? I inquired, innocently. You mean to say you don't know, said Miss Baker, honestly, surprised. I thought everybody knew. I don't why, she said hesitantly, Tom's got some woman in New York got some woman, I repeated blankly. Miss Baker nodded she might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner time, don't you think. Almost before I had grasped her meaning, there was the flutter of a dress and the crunch of leather boots, and Tom and Daisy were back at the

table. It couldn't be helped, cried Daisy, with tense gaiety. She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me, and continued. I looked outdoors for a minute, and it's very romantic outdoors. There's a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale. Come over on the Cunard or White Star line. He's singing away. Her voice sang. It's romantic, isn't it. Tom, Very romantic, he said, and then miserably to me, If it's light enough after dinner, I want

to take you down to the stables. The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom, the subject of the stables, in fact, all subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table, I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at everyone and yet

to avoid all eyes. Couldn't guess what Tom and Daisy were thinking. But I doubt if even Miss Baker, who seemed to have mastered a certain hearty skepticism, was able to utterly put this fifth guest's shrill, metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament, the situation might have seemed intriguing. My own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police. The horses, needless

to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss Baker, with several feet of twilight between them, strolled back into the library as if to a vigil, beside a perfectly tangible body, while trying to look pleasantly interested in a little deaf I followed Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front, in its deep gloom, we sat down side by side on

a wicker settee. Daisy took her face in her hands, as if feeling its lovely shape, and her eyes moved gradually out to the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative question about her a little girl. We don't know each other very well, Nick, she said suddenly, even if we are cousins, you didn't come to my wedding. I wasn't back from the war. That's true, she hesitated. Well, I've had a very bad time, Nick,

and I'm pretty cynical about everything. Evidently she had reason to be. I waited, but she didn't say anymore, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter. I suppose she talks and eats and everything. Oh yes, she looked at me absently. Listen, Nick, let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear very much? It'll show you I've gotten to feel about things. Well, she was less than an hour old, and Tom was god

knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. All right. I said, I'm glad it's a girl, and I hope she'll be a fool. That's the best thing a girl can be in this world, A beautiful little fool. You see. I think everything's terrible anyhow, she went on, in a convinced way. Everybody thinks,

so, the most advanced people. And I know I've been everywhere and seeing everything and done everything. Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom's, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. Sophisticated. God, I'm sophisticated. The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief. I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick

of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment, she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face, as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belong. Inside the Crimson room bloomed with light. Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the long couch, and she read aloud to him from the Saturday Evening Post, the words

murmurous and uninflected running together in a soothing tune. The lamplight, bright on his boots and dull on the autumn leaf. Yellow of her hair glinted along the paper as she turned the page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms. When we came in, she held as silent for a moment, with a lifted hand. To be continued, she said, tossing the magazine on the table in our very next issue. Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she stood up. Ten o'clock, she

remarked, apparently finding the time on the ceiling. Time for this good girl to go to bed. Jordan's going to play in the tournament tomorrow, explained Daisy over at Westchester, Oh, your Jordan Baker. I knew now why her face was familiar. It's pleasing, contemptuous expression had looked out at me for many a rhodogravier pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard some story of her, too, a critical,

unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long ago. Good Night, she said, softly, wake me at eight, won't you? If you'll get up, I will. Good Night, mister caraway see you Anon. Of course you will, confirmed Daisy. In fact, I think I'll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I'll sort of oh fling you together, you know, lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat and all that sort of thing.

Good night, called miss Baker from the stairs. I haven't heard a word. She's a nice girl, said Tom, after a moment. They oughtn't to let her run around the country this way? Who oughtn't to, inquired Daisy coldly. Her family? Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Nick's going to look after her, aren't you, Nick. She's going to spend lots of weekends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be very good for her. Daisy and Tom looked

at each other for a moment in silence. Is she from New York, i asked quickly. From Louisville? Our white girlhood was passed together there, our beautiful white Did you give Nick a little heart to heart talk on the Verandah, demanded Tom. Suddenly, did I? She looked at me. I can't seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I'm sure we did. It sort of crept up on us. And the first thing, you know, don't believe everything you hear,

Nick, he advised me. I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes later I got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood side by side in a cheerful square of light. As I started my motor, Daisy peremptorily called wait, I forgot to ask you something, and it's important. We heard you were engaged to a girl out west. That's right, corroborated Tom. We heard that

you were engaged. It's a libel. I'm too poor, but we heard it, insisted Daisy, surprising me by opening up again in a flower like way. We heard it from three people, so it must be true. Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn't even vaguely engaged. The fact that Gossip had published the bands was one of the reasons I had come east. You can't stop going with an old friend on account of rumors. And on the other hand, I had no intention of being

rumored into marriage. Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely rich. Nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house child in arms, But apparently there were no such intentions in her head. As for Tom, the fact that he had some woman in New York was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale, I'd he is,

as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart. Already it was deep summer on road house roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red petrol pumps sat out in pools of light. And when I reached my estate at West Egg, I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew

the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone. Fifty feet away, a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was mister Gatsby himself, come out

to determine what share was his of our local heavens. I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn't call for him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone. He stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from

him, I could have sworn he was trembling involuntarily. I glanced seaward and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby, he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness. End of Chapter one