My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan; the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one[1] and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.
I graduated from Yale University[2] in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in the Great War[3]. I came back restless. The Middle West was not the warm centre of the world any longer, now it seemed like the ragged edge of the universe – so I decided to go East and learn the bond business[4]. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two[5].
The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in the country, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a bungalow at eighty dollars a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to go to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had an old Dodge[6] and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast.
And so with the sunshine and green leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar confidence that life was beginning over again with the summer.
There was so much to read. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities[7], and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold their shining secrets. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. It was a matter of chance that I rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that island which extends itself to the east of New York – and where there are two unusual formations of land looking like a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a bay.
I lived at West Egg, the less fashionable of the two. My house was at the very tip of the egg, and squeezed between two huge villas rented for twelve or fifteen thousand dollars a season. The one on my right was a colossal thing by any standard, with a tower on one side, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby’s mansion. Or, rather, as I didn’t know Mr. Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an ugly thing, but it was small, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires – all for eighty dollars a month.
Across the bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin[8], and I’d known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.
Daisy’s husband had been a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute excellence at the age of twenty-one that everything afterward tastes like disappointment. His family were enormously wealthy, but now he’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance, he’d brought a number of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.
Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there wherever rich people got together to play polo. This was a permanent move[9], said Daisy over the telephone.
And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I hardly knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion[10], overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over brick walks and gardens. The front was broken by a line of French windows[11], glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.
He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a strong straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a haughty manner. Two shining arrogant eyes gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body – a cruel body.
There was a touch of paternal contempt in his voice, even toward people he liked – and there were men at New Haven who had hated him.
«Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final», he seemed to say, «just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are». We were in the same senior society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him.
We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch and then walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space. The windows were partly open. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the ceiling.
The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous sofa on which two young women were lying. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering.
The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was completely motionless, and with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which could fall. If she saw me she gave no hint of it.
The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise – she leaned slightly forward, then she laughed, and I laughed too and came into the room.
«I’m p-paralyzed with happiness». She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was her manner. She murmured that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker.
Miss Baker barely nodded at me, and then quickly tipped her head back again – the object she was balancing had obviously given her something of a fright.
I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down. Her face was sad and lovely, she had bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, and there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget.
I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way East, and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.
«Do they miss me?» she cried ecstatically.
«The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath, and there’s a persistent wail all night along the north shore».
«How gorgeous! Let’s go back, Tom. Tomorrow!» Then she suddenly added: «You ought to see the baby».
«I’d like to».
«She’s asleep. She’s three years old. Haven’t you ever seen her?»
«Never».
«Well, you ought to see her. She’s…»
Tom Buchanan, who had been hovering about the room, stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.
«What are you doing, Nick?»
«I’m a bond man[12]».
«Who with?»
I