The Great Gatsby
innocently. ‘You know the advertisement of the man——‘
‘All right,’ broke in Tom quickly, ‘I’m perfectly willing to go to town. Come on—we’re all going to town.’
He got up, his eyes still flashing between Gatsby and his wife. No one moved.
‘Come on!’ His temper cracked a little. ‘What’s the matter, anyhow? If we’re going to town let’s start.’
His hand, trembling with his effort at self control, bore to his lips the last of his glass of ale. Daisy’s voice got us to our feet and out on to the blazing gravel drive.
‘Are we just going to go?’ she objected. ‘Like this? Aren’t we going to let any one smoke a cigarette first?’
‘Everybody smoked all through lunch.’
‘Oh, let’s have fun,’ she begged him. ‘It’s too hot to fuss.’
He didn’t answer.
‘Have it your own way,’ she said. ‘Come on, Jordan.’
They went upstairs to get ready while we three men stood there shuffling the hot pebbles with our feet. A silver curve of the moon hovered already in the western sky. Gatsby started to speak, changed his mind, but not before Tom wheeled and faced him expectantly.
‘Have you got your stables here?’ asked Gatsby with an effort.
‘About a quarter of a mile down the road.’
‘Oh.’
A pause.
‘I don’t see the idea of going to town,’ broke out Tom savagely. ‘Women get these notions in their heads——‘
‘Shall we take anything to drink?’ called Daisy from an Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
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upper window.
‘I’ll get some whiskey,’ answered Tom. He went inside.
Gatsby turned to me rigidly:
‘I can’t say anything in his house, old sport.’
‘She’s got an indiscreet voice,’ I remarked. ‘It’s full of—
—‘I hesitated.
‘Her voice is full of money,’ he said suddenly.
That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it…. High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl….
Tom came out of the house wrapping a quart bottle in a towel, followed by Daisy and Jordan wearing small tight hats of metallic cloth and carrying light capes over their arms.
‘Shall we all go in my car?’ suggested Gatsby. He felt the hot, green leather of the seat. ‘I ought to have left it in the shade.’
‘Is it standard shift?’ demanded Tom.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, you take my coupé and let me drive your car to town.’
The suggestion was distasteful to Gatsby.
‘I don’t think there’s much gas,’ he objected.
‘Plenty of gas,’ said Tom boisterously. He looked at the gauge. ‘And if it runs out I can stop at a drug store. You can buy anything at a drug store nowadays.’
A pause followed this apparently pointless remark. Dai-1
The Great Gatsby
sy looked at Tom frowning and an indefinable expression, at once definitely unfamiliar and vaguely recognizable, as if I had only heard it described in words, passed over Gatsby’s face.
‘Come on, Daisy,’ said Tom, pressing her with his hand toward Gatsby’s car. ‘I’ll take you in this circus wagon.’
He opened the door but she moved out from the circle of his arm.
