He might have despised himself, for he had certainly taken her under false pretenses. I don't mean that he had traded on his phantom millions, but he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he let her believe that he was a person from much the same stratum as herself – that he was fully able to take care of her. As a matter of fact he had no such facilities – he had no comfortable family standing behind him and he was liable at the whim of an impersonal government to be blown anywhere about the world.
He knew that Daisy was extraordinary but he didn't realize just how extraordinary a “nice” girl could be. She vanished into her rich house, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby – nothing. He felt married to her, that was all.
“I can't describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport. She was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her… Well, there I was, way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn't care. What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?”
I didn't want to go to the city.
“I'll call you up,” I said finally.
“Do, old sport.”
“I'll call you about noon.”
We walked slowly down the steps.
“I suppose Daisy'll call too.”
“I suppose so.”
“Well – goodbye.”
We shook hands. I remembered something and turned around.
“They're a rotten crowd[65],” I shouted across the lawn. “You're worth the whole damn bunch put together[66].”
George Wilson told Michaelis, “He killed her.”
“Who did?”
“I have a way of finding out. He murdered her.”
“It was an accident, George.”
Wilson shook his head.
“I know,” he said definitely, “It was the man in that car. She ran out to speak to him and he wouldn't stop.”
“I spoke to her,” he muttered, after a long silence. “I told her she might fool me but she couldn't fool God. I said 'God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing.'”
Michaelis went home to sleep; when he awoke four hours later and hurried back to the garage, Wilson was gone.
His movements – he was on foot all the time – were afterward traced[67]. The police, on the strength of what he said[68] to Michaelis, that he “had a way of finding out,” supposed that he spent that time going from garage to garage inquiring for a yellow car. By half past two he was in West Egg where he asked someone the way to Gatsby's house. So by that time he knew Gatsby's name.
At two o'clock Gatsby put on his bathing suit.
The chauffeur heard the shots. Just that time I drove from the station directly to Gatsby's house. Four of us, the chauffeur, servant, gardener and I, hurried down to the pool. Gatsby was lying in the pool dead.
It was after we brought Gatsby's body toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson's body a little way off in the grass. The holocaust[69] was complete.
Chapter 9
Most of those reports were a nightmare – grotesque, circumstantial, eager and untrue. But all this seemed remote.
I called up Daisy half an hour after we found him, called her instinctively and without hesitation. But she and Tom had gone away early that afternoon, and taken baggage with them.
“Left no address?”
“No.”
“Say when they'd be back?”
“No.”
“Any idea where they are? How I could reach them?”
“I don't know. Can't say.”
I wanted to get somebody for him[70]. I wanted to go into the room where he lay and reassure him: “I'll get somebody for you, Gatsby. Don't worry. Just trust me and I'll get somebody for you.”
When the phone rang that afternoon I thought this would be Daisy at last. But I heard a strange man's voice. The name was unfamiliar.
“Young Parke's in trouble,” he said rapidly. “They picked him up[71].”
“Hello!” I interrupted. “Look here – this isn't Mr. Gatsby. Mr. Gatsby's dead.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the wire… then the connection was broken.
On the third day that a telegram signed Henry C. Gatz arrived from a town in Minnesota. It was Gatsby's father.
“I saw it in the Chicago newspaper,” he said. “It was all in the Chicago newspaper. I started right away.”
“I didn't know how to reach you. We were close friends.”
“He had a big future before him, you know. He was only a young man but he had a lot of brain power here.”
“That's true,” I said.
That was all. Daisy hadn't sent a message or a flower. “Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on[72].”
Nobody came to Gatsby's house, but they used to go there by the hundreds.
One afternoon late in October I saw Tom Buchanan. Suddenly he saw me and walked back holding out his hand.
“What's the matter, Nick? Do you object to shaking hands with me?”
“Yes. You know what I think of you.”
“You're crazy, Nick,” he said quickly. “I don't know what's the matter with you.”
“Tom,” I inquired, “what did you say to Wilson that afternoon?”
“I told him the truth,” he said. “He was crazy enough to kill me if I hadn't told him who owned the car.”
I couldn't forgive him or like him but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the future that year by year recedes before us. We try to swim against the current, taken back ceaselessly into the past.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
In 1860 it was proper to be born at home. Now, so I am told, children are usually born in fashionable hospitals. So young Mr. and Mrs. Roger Button were fifty years ahead of style when they decided that their first baby should be born in a hospital. Whether it played any role in the astonishing story I am about to tell we will never know.
I shall tell you what happened, and let you judge for yourself.
The Roger Buttons held a high position, both social and financial, in Baltimore. This was their first baby – Mr. Button was naturally nervous. He hoped it would be a boy