They were gone, without a word, snapped out, made accidental, isolated, like ghosts even from our pity.
After a moment Tom got up and began wrapping the unopened bottle of whiskey in the towel.
“Want any of this stuff? Jordan?…Nick?”
I didn't answer.
“Nick?” He asked again.
“What?”
“Want any?”
“No… I just remembered that today's my birthday.”
I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous menacing road of a new decade.
It was seven o'clock when we got into the coupe with him and started for Long Island. Tom talked incessantly, exulting and laughing, but his voice was as remote from Jordan and me as the foreign clamor on the sidewalk or the tumult of the elevated overhead. Human sympathy has its limits and we were content to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind. Thirty – the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat's shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.
So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.
The young Greek Michaelis[61] was the principal witness at the inquest. He had slept through the heat until after five, when he went to the garage and found George Wilson sick in his office. Michaelis advised him to go to bed but Wilson refused. While his neighbour was trying to persuade him some noise broke out overhead.
“I've got my wife locked in up there[62],” explained Wilson calmly. “She's going to stay there till the day after tomorrow and then we're going to move away.”
Michaelis was astonished; they had been neighbours for four years and Wilson had never seemed capable of such a statement[63]. He was his wife's man and not his own.
So naturally Michaelis tried to find out what had happened, but Wilson wouldn't say a word. Michaelis took the opportunity to get away, intending to come back later. But he didn't.
A little after seven he was heard Mrs. Wilson's voice, loud and scolding, downstairs in the garage.
“Beat me!” he heard her cry. “Throw me down and beat me, you dirty little coward!”
A moment later she rushed out into the dusk, waving her hands and shouting; before he could move from his door the business was over[64].
The “death car” as the newspapers called it, didn't stop; it came out of the gathering darkness and then disappeared around the next bend. Michaelis wasn't even sure of its colour – somebody told the first policeman that it was yellow. Myrtle Wilson was lying dead. Her mouth was wide open.
We saw the three or four automobiles and the crowd when we were still some distance away.
“Wreck!” said Tom. “That's good. Wilson'll have a little business at last. We'll take a look, just a look.”
Then he saw Myrtle's body.
“What happened – that's what I want to know!”
“Auto hit her. Instantly killed. She ran out in a road. Son-of-a-bitch didn't even stop the car.”
“I know what kind of car it was!”
Tom drove slowly until we were beyond the bend. In a little while I saw that the tears were overflowing down his face.
“The coward!” he whimpered. “He didn't even stop his car.”
The Buchanans' house floated suddenly toward us through the dark trees. Tom stopped beside the porch.
I hadn't gone twenty yards when I heard my name and Gatsby stepped from between two bushes into the path.
“What are you doing?” I inquired.
“Just standing here, old sport. Did you see any trouble on the road?” he asked after a minute.
“Yes.”
He hesitated.
“Was she killed?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so; I told Daisy I thought so. I got to West Egg by a side road,” he went on, “and left the car in my garage. I don't think anybody saw us but of course I can't be sure. Who was the woman?” he inquired.
“Her name was Wilson. Her husband owns the garage. How did it happen? Was Daisy driving?”
“Yes,” he said after a moment, “but of course I'll say I was. You see, when we left New York she was very nervous – and this woman rushed out… It all happened in a minute but it seemed to me that she wanted to speak to us, thought we were somebody she knew.”
Chapter 8
I couldn't sleep all night; a fog-horn was groaning incessantly on the Sound, and I tossed half-sick between grotesque reality and savage frightening dreams. Toward dawn I heard a taxi go up Gatsby's drive and immediately I jumped out of bed and began to dress – I felt that I had something to tell him, something to warn him about and morning would be too late.
Crossing his lawn I saw that his front door was still open and he was leaning against a table in the hall, heavy with dejection or sleep.
“Nothing happened,” he said wanly. “I waited, and about four o'clock she came to the window and stood there for a minute and then turned out the light.”
His house had never seemed so enormous to me as it did that night when we hunted through the great rooms for cigarettes. We pushed aside curtains that were like pavilions and felt over innumerable feet of dark wall for electric light switches – once I tumbled with a sort of splash upon the keys of a ghostly piano. There was an inexplicable amount of dust everywhere and the rooms were musty as though they hadn't been aired for many days. I found the humidor on an unfamiliar table with two stale dry cigarettes inside. Throwing open the French windows of the drawing-room we sat smoking out into the darkness.
“You ought to go away,” I said. “It's pretty certain they'll trace your car.”
“Go away NOW, old sport?”
“Go to Atlantic City for a week, or up to Montreal.”
He wouldn't consider it. He couldn't possibly leave Daisy until he knew what she was going to do. He was clutching at some last hope and I couldn't bear to shake him free.
It was this night that he told me the strange story of his youth with Dan Cody – told it to me because “Jay Gatsby” had broken up like glass against Tom's hard malice and the long secret extravaganza was played out. I think that he would have acknowledged anything, now, without reserve, but he wanted to talk about Daisy.
She was the first “nice” girl he had ever known. In various unrevealed capacities he had come in contact with such people but always with indiscernible barbed wire between. He found her excitingly desirable. He went to her house, at first with other officers, then alone. It amazed him – he had never been in such a beautiful house before. But what gave it an air of breathless intensity was that Daisy lived there – it was as casual a thing to her as his tent out at camp was to him. There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its corridors and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year's shining motor cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered. It excited him too that many men had already loved