I sat on the front steps with them while they waited for their car. It was dark here in front; only the bright door sent ten square feet of light volleying out into the soft black morning. Sometimes a shadow moved against a dressing-room blind above, gave way to another shadow, an indefinite procession of shadows, who rouged and powdered in an invisible glass.
Who is this Gatsby anyhow? demanded Tom suddenly. Some big bootlegger?
Whered you hear that? I inquired.
Whered you hear that? I inquired.
I didnt hear it. I imagined it. A lot of these newly rich people are just big bootleggers, you know.
Not Gatsby, I said shortly.
He was silent for a moment. The pebbles of the drive crunched under his feet.
Well, he certainly must have strained himself to get this menagerie together.
A breeze stirred the grey haze of Daisys fur collar.
At least they are more interesting than the people we know, she said with an effort.
You didnt look so interested.
Well, I was.
Tom laughed and turned to me.
Did you notice Daisys face when that girl asked her to put her under a cold shower?
Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rythmic whisper, bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again. When the melody rose her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little other warm human magic upon the air.
Lots of people come who havent been invited, she said suddenly. That girl hadnt been invited. They simply force their way in and hes too polite to object.
Id like to know who he is and what he does, insisted Tom. And I think Ill make a point of finding out.
I can tell you right now, she answered. He owned some drug-stores, a lot of drug-stores. He built them up himself.
The dilatory limousine came rolling up the drive.
Good night, Nick, said Daisy.
Her glance left me and sought the lighted top of the steps, where Three oclock in the Morning, a neat, sad little waltz of that year, was drifting out the open door. After all, in the very casualness of Gatsbys party there were romantic possibilities totally absent from her world. What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling her back inside? What would happen now in the dim, incalculable hours? Perhaps some unbelievable guest would arrive, a person infinitely rare and to be marveled at, 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.
I stayed late that night, Gatsby asked me to wait until he was free, and I lingered in the garden until the inevitable swimming party had run up, chilled and exalted, from the black beach, until the lights were extinguished in the guest-rooms overhead. When he came down the steps at last the tanned skin was drawn unusually tight on his face, and his eyes were bright and tired.
She didnt like it, he said immediately.
Of course she did.
She didnt like it, he insisted. She didnt have a good time.
He was silent, and I guessed at his unutterable depression.
I feel far away from her, he said. Its hard to make her understand.
You mean about the dance?
The dance? He dismissed all the dances he had given with a snap of his fingers. Old sport, the dance is unimportant.
He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: I never loved you. After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from her house just as if it were five years ago.
And she doesnt understand, he said. She used to be able to understand. Wed sit for hours
He broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favours and crushed flowers.
I wouldnt ask too much of her, I ventured. You cant repeat the past.
Cant repeat the past? he cried incredulously. Why of course you can!
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of this hand.
Im going to fix everything just the way it was before, he said, nodding determinedly. Shell see.
He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was
One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street 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 into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.