Jimmy sent it to me. I think its a very pretty picture. It shows up well.
Very well. Had you seen him lately?
He come out to see me two years ago and bought me the house I live in now. Of course we was broke up when he run off from home, but I see now there was a reason for it. He knew he had a big future in front of him. And ever since he made a success he was very generous with me.
He seemed reluctant to put away the picture, held it for another minute, lingeringly, before my eyes. Then he returned the wallet and pulled from his pocket a ragged old copy of a book called Hopalong Cassidy[100].
Look here, this is a book he had when he was a boy. It just shows you.
He opened it at the back cover and turned it around for me to see. On the last fly-leaf was printed the word SCHEDULE, and the date September 12, 1906. And underneath:
Rise from bed 6.00 A.M.
Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling 6.156.30
Study electricity, etc 7.158.15
Work 8.304.30 P.M.
Baseball and sports 4.305.00 P.M.
Practice elocution, poise and
how to attain it 5.006.00
Study needed inventions. 7.009.00
GENERAL RESOLVES
No wasting time at Shafters or [a name, indecipherable]
No more smoking or chewing.
Bath every other day
Read one improving book or magazine per week
Save $5.00 [crossed out] $3.00 per week
Be better to parents
I come across this book by accident, said the old man. It just shows you, dont it?
It just shows you.
Jimmy was bound to get ahead. He always had some resolves like this or something. Do you notice what hes got about improving his mind? He was always great for that. He told me I et like a hog once, and I beat him for it.
He was reluctant to close the book, reading each item aloud and then looking eagerly at me. I think he rather expected me to copy down the list for my own use.
A little before three the Lutheran minister arrived from Flushing, and I began to look involuntarily out the windows for other cars. So did Gatsbys father. And as the time passed and the servants came in and stood waiting in the hall, his eyes began to blink anxiously, and he spoke of the rain in a worried, uncertain way. The minister glanced several times at his watch, so I took him aside and asked him to wait for half an hour. But it wasnt any use. Nobody came.
* * *About five oclock our procession of three cars reached the cemetery and stopped in a thick drizzle beside the gate first a motor hearse, horribly black and wet, then Mr. Gatz and the minister and me in the limousine, and a little later four or five servants and the postman from West Egg, in Gatsbys station wagon, all wet to the skin. As we started through the gate into the cemetery I heard a car stop and then the sound of someone splashing after us over the soggy ground. I looked around. It was the man with owl-eyed glasses whom I had found marveling over Gatsbys books in the library one night three months before.
Id never seen him since then. I dont know how he knew about the funeral, or even his name. The rain poured down his thick glasses, and he took them off and wiped them to see the protecting canvas unrolled from Gatsbys grave.
I tried to think about Gatsby then for a moment, but he was already too far away, and I could only remember, without resentment, that Daisy hadnt sent a message or a flower. Dimly I heard someone murmur Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on,[101] and then the owl-eyed man said Amen to that, in a brave voice.
We straggled down quickly through the rain to the cars. Owl-eyes spoke to me by the gate.
I couldnt get to the house, he remarked.
Neither could anybody else.
Go on! He started. Why, my God! they used to go there by the hundreds.
He took off his glasses and wiped them again, outside and in.
The poor son-of-a-bitch, he said.
* * *One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six oclock of a December evening, with a few Chicago friends, already caught up into their own holiday gaieties, to bid them a hasty goodbye. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss ThisorThats and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: Are you going to the Ordways? the Herseys? the Schultzes? and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.
When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.