‘Oh, hello, old sport,’ he said, as if he hadn’t seen me for years. I thought for a moment he was going to shake hands.
‘It’s stopped raining.’
‘Has it? When he realized what I was talking about, that there were twinkle-bells of sunshine in the room, he smiled like a weather man, like an ecstatic patron of recurrent light, and repeated the news to Daisy. ‘What do you think of that? It’s stopped raining.’
‘I’m glad, Jay.’ Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told only of her unexpected joy.
‘I want you and Daisy to come over to my house,’ he said, ‘I’d like to show her around.’
‘You’re sure you want me to come?’
‘Absolutely, old sport.’
Daisy went upstairs to wash her face – too late I thought with humiliation of my towels – while Gatsby and I waited on the lawn.
‘My house looks well, doesn’t it?’ he demanded. ‘See how the whole front of it catches the light.’
I agreed that it was splendid.
‘Yes.’ His eyes went over it, every arched door and square tower. ‘It took me just three years to earn the money that bought it.’
‘I thought you inherited your money.’
‘I did, old sport,’ he said automatically, ‘but I lost most of it in the big panic – the panic of the war.’
I think he hardly knew what he was saying, for when I asked him what business he was in he answered: ‘That’s my affair,’ before he realized that it wasn’t an appropriate reply.
‘Oh, I’ve been in several things,’ he corrected himself. ‘I was in the drug business and then I was in the oil business. But I’m not in either one now.’ He looked at me with more attention. ‘Do you mean you’ve been thinking over what I proposed the other night?’
Before I could answer, Daisy came out of the house and two rows of brass buttons on her dress gleamed in the sunlight.
‘That huge place there?’ she cried pointing.
‘Do you like it?’
‘I love it, but I don’t see how you live there all alone.’
‘I keep it always full of interesting people, night and day. People who do interesting things. Celebrated people.’
Instead of taking the short cut along the Sound we went down to the road and entered by the big postern. With enchanting murmurs Daisy admired this aspect or that of the feudal silhouette against the sky, admired the gardens, the sparkling odour of jonquils and the frothy odour of hawthorn and plum blossoms and the pale gold odour of kiss-me-at-the-gate. It was strange to reach the marble steps and find no stir of bright dresses in and out the door, and hear no sound but bird voices in the trees.
And inside, as we wandered through Marie Antoinette[75] music-rooms and Restoration[76] Salons, I felt that there were guests concealed behind every couch and table, under orders to be breathlessly silent until we had passed through. As Gatsby closed the door of ‘the Merton College Library’ I could have sworn I heard the owl-eyed man break into ghostly laughter.
We went upstairs, through period bedrooms swathed in rose and lavender silk and vivid with new flowers, through dressing-rooms and poolrooms, and bathrooms with sunken baths – intruding into one chamber where a disheveled man in pyjamas was doing liver exercises on the floor. It was Mr. Klipspringer, the ‘boarder.’ I had seen him wandering hungrily about the beach that morning. Finally we came to Gatsby’s own apartment, a bedroom and a bath, and an Adam’s study, where we sat down and drank a glass of some Chartreuse[77] he took from a cupboard in the wall.
He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs.
His bedroom was the simplest room of all – except where the dresser was garnished with a toilet set of pure dull gold. Daisy took the brush with delight, and smoothed her hair, whereupon Gatsby sat down and shaded his eyes and began to laugh.
‘It’s the funniest thing, old sport,’ he said hilariously. ‘I can’t – When I try to —’
He had passed visibly through two states and was entering upon a third. After his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed with wonder at her presence. He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an over-wound clock.
Recovering himself in a minute he opened for us two hulking patent cabinets which held his massed suits and dressing-gowns and ties, and his shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.
‘I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall.’
He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many coloured disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher – shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.
‘They’re such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such – such beautiful shirts before.’
After the house, we were to see the grounds and the swimming-pool, and the hydroplane and the midsummer flowers – but outside Gatsby’s window it began to rain again, so we stood in a row looking at the corrugated surface of the Sound.
‘If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay,’ said Gatsby. ‘You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.’
Daisy put her arm through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.
I began to walk about the room, examining various indefinite objects in the half darkness. A large photograph of an elderly man in yachting costume attracted me, hung on the wall over his desk.
‘Who’s this?’
‘That? That’s Mr. Dan Gody, old sport.’
The name sounded faintly familiar.
‘He’s dead now. He used to be my best friend years ago.’
There was a small picture of Gatsby, also in yachting costume, on the bureau – Gatsby with his head thrown back defiantly – taken apparently when he was about eighteen.