‘She didn’t like it,’ he said immediately.
‘Of course she did.’
‘She didn’t like it,’ he insisted. ‘She didn’t have a good time.’
He was silent and I guessed at his unutterable depres-sion.
‘I feel far away from her,’ he said. ‘It’s 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 unim-portant.’
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11
He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: ‘I never loved you.’ After she had obliter-ated three 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 doesn’t understand,’ he said. ‘She used to be able to understand. We’d sit for hours——‘
He broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers.‘I wouldn’t ask too much of her,’ I ventured. ‘You can’t repeat the past.’
‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurk-ing here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.
‘I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,’ he said, nodding determinedly. ‘She’ll 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 11
The Great Gatsby
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 sidewalk 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.
His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the in-carnation was complete.
Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.
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11
Chapter 7
It was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights in his house failed to go on one Saturday night—and, as obscurely as it had begun, his career as Tri-malchio was over.
Only gradually did I become aware that the automobiles which turned expectantly into his drive stayed for just a minute and then drove sulkily away. Wondering if he were sick I went over to find out—an unfamiliar butler with a vil-lainous face squinted at me suspiciously from the door.
‘Is Mr. Gatsby sick?’
‘Nope.’ After a pause he added ‘sir’ in a dilatory, grudg-ing way.
‘I hadn’t seen him around, and I was rather worried. Tell him Mr. Carraway came over.’
‘Who?’ he demanded rudely.
‘Carraway.’
‘Carraway. All right, I’ll tell him.’ Abruptly he slammed the door.
My Finn informed me that Gatsby had dismissed every servant in his house a week ago and replaced them with half a dozen others, who never went into West Egg Village to be bribed by the tradesmen, but ordered moderate supplies over the telephone. The grocery boy reported that the kitchen looked like a pigsty, and the general opinion in the 10
The Great Gatsby
village was that the new people weren’t servants at all.
Next day Gatsby called me on the phone.
‘Going away?’ I inquired.
‘No, old sport.’
‘I hear you fired all your servants.’
‘I wanted somebody who wouldn’t gossip. Daisy comes over quite often—in the afternoons.’
So the whole caravansary had fallen in like a card house at the disapproval in her eyes.
