The Great Gatsby E-Book

F.Scott Fitzgerald

• Herausgeber: Andura Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

A timeless American literary treasure by acclaimed author, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Leseprobe

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Contents

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;

  If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,

Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,

  I must have you!"

                    --THOMAS PARKE D'INVILLIERS

Chapter 1

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice

that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just

remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages

that you've had."

He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative

in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more

than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments,

a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also

made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind

is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it

appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I

was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the

secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were

unsought--frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile

levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate

revelation was quivering on the horizon--for the intimate revelations

of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are

usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving

judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of

missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested,

and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is

parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission

that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet

marshes but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on.

When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the

world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I

wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the

human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was

exempt from my reaction--Gatsby who represented everything for which I

have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of

successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some

heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related

to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten

thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that

flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the

"creative temperament"--it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic

readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it

is not likely I shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right

at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the

wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the

abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western

city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan and we

have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the

actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother who came here in

fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale

hardware business that my father carries on today.

I never saw this great-uncle but I'm supposed to look like him--with

special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in

Father's office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a

century after my father, and a little later I participated in that

delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the

counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being

the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the

ragged edge of the universe--so I decided to go east and learn the bond

business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it

could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it

over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said,

"Why--ye-es" with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance

me for a year and after various delays I came east, permanently, I

thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

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 a commuting town it sounded like a great idea. He found

the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but

at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went out

to the country alone. I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days

until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed

and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the

electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently

arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

"How do you get to West Egg village?" he asked helplessly.

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a

pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the

freedom of the neighborhood.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the

trees--just as things grow in fast movies--I had that familiar

conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be

pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen

volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood

on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to

unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas

knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides.

I was rather literary in college--one year I wrote a series of very

solemn and obvious editorials for the "Yale News"--and now I was going

to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most

limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man." This isn't just an

epigram--life is much more successfully looked at from a single window,

after all.

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of

the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender

riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where

there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of

land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in

contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most

domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great

wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals--like the

egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact

end--but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual

confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more

arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except

shape and size.

I lived at West Egg, the--well, the less fashionable of the two, though

this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little

sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the

egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge

places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on

my right was a colossal affair by any standard--it was a factual

imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side,

spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, 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 eye-sore, but it was a

small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, 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 courtesy 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 once removed and I'd known Tom

in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in

Chicago.

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of

the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven--a

national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute

limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of

anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy--even in college his

freedom with money was a matter for reproach--but now he'd left Chicago

and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for

instance he'd brought down a string 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 unrestfully wherever

people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move,

said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn't believe it--I had no sight

into Daisy's heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking

a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable

football game.

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East

Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was

even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian

Colonial mansion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach

and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over

sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens--finally when it reached

the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the

momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows,

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 sturdy, straw haired

man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner.

Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and

gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not

even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous

power of that body--he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he

strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle

shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body

capable of enormous leverage--a cruel body.

His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of

fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in

it, even toward people he liked--and there were men at New Haven who had

hated his guts.

"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 with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.

"I've got a nice place here," he said, his eyes flashing about

restlessly.

Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the

front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half

acre of deep pungent roses and a snub-nosed motor boat that bumped

the tide off shore.

"It belonged to Demaine the oil man." He turned me around again,

politely and abruptly. "We'll go inside."

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space,

fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end.

The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass

outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze

blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other

like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of

the ceiling--and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a

shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch

on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored

balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and

fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight

around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the

whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall.

Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught

wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two

young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length

at her end of the divan, completely motionless and with her chin raised

a little as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely

to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of

it--indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having

disturbed her by coming in.

The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise--she leaned slightly

forward with a conscientious expression--then she laughed, an absurd,

charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward 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 a way she had.

She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker.

(I've heard it said that Daisy's murmur was only to make people

lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)

At any rate Miss Baker's lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost

imperceptibly and then quickly tipped her head back again--the object

she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something

of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any

exhibition of complete self sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.

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 as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be

played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it,

bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth--but there was an excitement

in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget:

a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done

gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay,

exciting things hovering in the next hour.

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 added

irrelevantly, "You ought to see the baby."

"I'd like to."

"She's asleep. She's two years old. Haven't you ever seen her?"

"Never."

"Well, you ought to see her. She's----"

Tom Buchanan who had been hovering restlessly about the room stopped

and rested his hand on my shoulder.

"What you doing, Nick?"

"I'm a bond man."

"Who with?"

I told him.

"Never heard of them," he remarked decisively.

This annoyed me.

"You will," I answered shortly. "You will if you stay in the East."

"Oh, I'll stay in the East, don't you worry," he said, glancing at

Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more.

"I'd be a God Damned fool to live anywhere else."

At this point Miss Baker said "Absolutely!" with such suddenness that I

started--it was the first word she uttered since I came into the room.

Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and

with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.

"I'm stiff," she complained, "I've been lying on that sofa for as long

as I can remember."

"Don't look at me," Daisy retorted. "I've been trying to get you to New

York all afternoon."

"No, thanks," said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the

pantry, "I'm absolutely in training."

Her host looked at her incredulously.

"You are!" He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of

a glass. "How you ever get anything done is beyond me."

I looked at Miss Baker wondering what it was she "got done." I enjoyed

looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect

carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the

shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at

me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented

face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her,

somewhere before.

"You live in West Egg," she remarked contemptuously. "I know somebody

there."

"I don't know a single----"

"You must know Gatsby."

"Gatsby?" demanded Daisy. "What Gatsby?"

Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced;

wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine Tom Buchanan compelled

me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.

Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips the two

young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch open toward the

sunset where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished

wind.

"Why CANDLES?" objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her

fingers. "In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year."

She looked at us all radiantly. "Do you always watch for the longest day

of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the

year and then miss it."

"We ought to plan something," yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the

table as if she were getting into bed.

"All right," said Daisy. "What'll we plan?" She turned to me helplessly.

"What do people plan?"

Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her

little finger.

"Look!" she complained. "I hurt it."

We all looked--the knuckle was black and blue.

"You did it, Tom," she said accusingly. "I know you didn't mean to

but you DID do it. That's what I get for marrying a brute of a man,

a great big hulking physical specimen of a----"

"I hate that word hulking," objected Tom crossly, "even in kidding."

"Hulking," insisted Daisy.

Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a

bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool

as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all

desire. They were here--and they accepted Tom and me, making only a

polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew

that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too

would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the

West where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its

close in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer

nervous dread of the moment itself.

"You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy," I confessed on my second glass

of corky but rather impressive claret. "Can't you talk about crops or

something?"

I meant nothing in particular by this remark but it was taken up in an

unexpected way.

"Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom violently.

"I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read

'The Rise of the Coloured Empires' by this man Goddard?"

"Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

"Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if

we don't look out the white race will be--will be utterly submerged.

It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."

"Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy with an expression of

unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them.

What was that word we----"

"Well, these books are all scientific," insisted Tom, glancing at her

impatiently. "This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us

who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have

control of things."

"We've got to beat them down," whispered Daisy, winking ferociously

toward the fervent sun.

"You ought to live in California--" began Miss Baker but Tom

interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.

"This idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are and you are

and----" After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a

slight nod and she winked at me again. "--and we've produced all the

things that go to make civilization--oh, science and art and all that.

Do you see?"

There was something pathetic in his concentration as if his complacency,

more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more. When, almost

immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch Daisy

seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned toward me.

"I'll tell you a family secret," she whispered enthusiastically. "It's

about the butler's nose. Do you want to hear about the butler's nose?"

"That's why I came over tonight."

"Well, he wasn't always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher for

some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people.

He had to polish it from morning till night until finally it began to

affect his nose----"

"Things went from bad to worse," suggested Miss Baker.

"Yes. Things went from bad to worse until finally he had to give up

his position."

For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon

her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as

I listened--then the glow faded, each light deserting her with

lingering regret like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.

The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom's ear

whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair and without a word went

inside. As if his absence quickened something within her Daisy leaned

forward again, her voice glowing and singing.

"I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a--of a rose, an

absolute rose. Doesn't he?" She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation.

"An absolute rose?"

This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only

extemporizing but a stirring warmth flowed from her as if her

heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those

breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the

table and excused herself and went into the house.

Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of

meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said "Sh!" in

a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room

beyond and Miss Baker leaned forward, unashamed, trying to hear. The

murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted

excitedly, and then ceased altogether.

"This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbor----" I said.

"Don't talk. I want to hear what happens."

"Is something happening?" I inquired innocently.

"You mean to say you don't know?" said Miss Baker, honestly surprised.

"I thought everybody knew."

"I don't."

"Why----" she said hesitantly, "Tom's got some woman in New York."

"Got some woman?" I repeated blankly.

Miss Baker nodded.

"She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner-time. Don't

you think?"

Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of

a dress and the crunch of leather boots and Tom and Daisy were back

at the table.

"It couldn't be helped!" cried Daisy with tense gayety.

She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me and

continued: "I looked outdoors for a minute and it's very romantic

outdoors. There's a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale

come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He's singing away----" her

voice sang "----It's romantic, isn't it, Tom?"

"Very romantic," he said, and then miserably to me: "If it's light enough

after dinner I want to take you down to the stables."

The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her

head decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all

subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the

last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again,

pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at every

one and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn't guess what Daisy and Tom

were thinking but I doubt if even Miss Baker who seemed to have

mastered a certain hardy skepticism was able utterly to put this fifth

guest's shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament

the situation might have seemed intriguing--my own instinct was to

telephone immediately for the police.

The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss

Baker, with several feet of twilight between them strolled back into

the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while

trying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf I followed

Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. In

its deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee.

Daisy took her face in her hands, as if feeling its lovely shape, and

her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent

emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some

sedative questions about her little girl.

"We don't know each other very well, Nick," she said suddenly.

"Even if we are cousins. You didn't come to my wedding."

"I wasn't back from the war."

"That's true." She hesitated. "Well, I've had a very bad time, Nick,

and I'm pretty cynical about everything."

Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn't say any more,

and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her

daughter.

"I suppose she talks, and--eats, and everything."

"Oh, yes." She looked at me absently. "Listen, Nick; let me tell you what

I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?"

"Very much."

"It'll show you how I've gotten to feel about--things. Well, she was less

than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether

with an utterly abandoned feeling and asked the nurse right away if it

was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head

away and wept. 'All right,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope

she'll be a fool--that's the best thing a girl can be in this world,

a beautiful little fool."

"You see I think everything's terrible anyhow," she went on in a

convinced way. "Everybody thinks so--the most advanced people. And I KNOW.

I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything."

Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom's, and she

laughed with thrilling scorn. "Sophisticated--God, I'm sophisticated!"

The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention,

my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said.

It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick

of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited,

and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk

on her lovely face as if she had asserted her membership in a rather