As I tiptoed from the porch I heard my taxi feeling its way along the dark drive towards the house.Gatsby was waiting where I had left him in the drive.
‘Is it all quiet up there?’he asked anxiously.
‘Yes,it's all quiet.’I hesitated.‘You'd better come home and get some sleep.’
He shook his head.
‘I want to wait here till Daisy goes to bed.Good-night,old sport.’
He put his hands in his coat pockets and turned back eagerly to his scrutiny of the house,as though my presence marred the sacredness of the vigil.So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight-watching over nothing.
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.Towards 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 from Camp Taylor,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 Daisy-it increased her value in his eyes.He felt their presence all about the house,pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions.
But he knew that he was in Daisy's house by a colossal accident.However glorious might be his future as Jay Gatsby,he was at present a penniless young man without a past,and at any moment the invisible cloak of his uniform might slip from his shoulders.So he made the most of his time.He took what he could get,ravenously and unscrupulously-eventually he took Daisy one still October night,took her because he had no real right to touch her hand.
He might have despised himself,for he had certainly taken her under false pretences.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 strata 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.
But he didn't despise himself and it didn't turn out as he had imagined.He had intended,probably,to take what he could and go-but now he found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail.He knew that Daisy was extraordinary,but he didn't realise 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.
When they met again,two days later,it was Gatsby who was breathless,who was,somehow,betrayed.Her porch was bright with the bought luxury of star-shine;the wicker of the settee squeaked fashionably as she turned towards him and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth.She had caught a cold,and it made her voice huskier and more charming than ever,and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves,of the freshness of many clothes,and of Daisy,gleaming like silver,safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.
‘I can't describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her,old sport.I even hoped for a while that she'd throw me over,but she didn't,because 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?’