A little before three the Lutheran minister arrived from Flushing,and I began to look involuntarily out the windows for other cars.So did Gatsby's father.And as the time passed and the servants came in and stood waiting in the hall,his eyes began to blink anxiously,and he spoke of the rain in a worried,uncertain way.The minister glanced several times at his watch,so I took him aside and asked him to wait for half an hour.But it wasn't any use.Nobody came.
About five o'clock our procession of three cars reached the cemetery and stopped in a thick drizzle beside the gate-first a motor hearse,horribly black and wet,then Mr Gatz and the minister and I in the limousine,and a little later four or five servants and the postman from West Egg,in Gatsby's station-wagon,all wet to the skin.As we started through the gate into the cemetery I heard a car stop and then the sound of someone splashing after us over the soggy ground.I looked around.It was the man with owl-eyed glasses whom I had found marvelling over Gatsby's books in the library one night three months before.
I'd never seen him since then.I don't know how he knew about the funeral,or even his name.The rain poured down his thick glasses,and he took them of and wiped them to see the protecting canvas unrolled from Gatsby's grave.
I tried to think about Gatsby then for a moment,but he was already too far away,and I could only remember,without resentment,that Daisy hadn't sent a message or a flower.Dimly I heard someone murmur,‘Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on,’and then the owl-eyed man said,‘Amen to that,’in a brave voice.
We straggled down quickly through the rain to the cars.Owl-eyes spoke to me by the gate.
‘I couldn't get to the house,’he remarked.
‘Neither could anybody else.’
‘Go on!’He started.‘Why,my God!they used to go there by the hundreds.’
He took off his glasses and wiped them again,outside and in.
‘The poor son-of-a-bitch,’he said.
One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmastime.Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o'clock of a December evening,with a few Chicago friends,already caught up into their own holiday gaieties,to bid them a hasty goodbye.I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-That's and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances,and the matchings of invitations:‘Are you going to the Ordways’?the Herseys’?the Schultzes’?’and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands.And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago,Milwaukee &St Paul Railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.
When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow,our snow,began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows,and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by,a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air.We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules,unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour,before we melted indistinguishably into it again.
That's my Middle West-not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns,but the thrilling returning trains of my youth,and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.I am part of that,a little solemn with the feel of those long winters,a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name.I see now that this has been a story of the West,after all-Tom and Gatsby,Daisy and Jordan and I were all Westerners,and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.
Even when the East excited me most,even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored,sprawling,swollen towns beyond the Ohio,with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old-even then it had always for me a quality of distortion.West Egg,especially,still figures in my more fantastic dreams.I see it as a night scene by El Greco:a hundred houses,at once conventional and grotesque,crouching under a sullen,overhanging sky and a lustreless moon.In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking long the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress.Her hand,which dangles over the side,sparkles cold with jewels.Gravely the men turn in at a house-the wrong house.But no one knows the woman's name,and no one cares.
After Gatsby's death the East was haunted for me like that,distorted beyond my eyes'power of correction.So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.
There was one thing to be done before I left,an awkward,unpleasant thing that perhaps had better have been let alone.But I wanted to leave things in order and not just trust that obliging and indifferent sea to sweep my refuse away.I saw Jordan Baker and talked over and around what had happened to us together,and what had happened afterward to me,and she lay perfectly still,listening,in a big chair.