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 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 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[73] so that he could be sent to Yale College in Connecticut, the institution to which Mr. Button himself had been once sent.
On that September morning he got up at six o'clock, dressed himself, and hurried to the hospital. When he was approximately a hundred yards from the Maryland Private Hospital for Ladies and Gentlemen he saw Doctor Keene, the family physician, descending the front steps, rubbing his hands together as all doctors do by the unwritten ethics of their profession.
Mr. Roger Button, the president of Roger Button amp; Co., Wholesale Hardware, began to run toward Doctor Keene. “Doctor Keene!” he called.
The doctor heard him, turned around, and stood waiting, with a curious expression on his harsh, medicinal face.
“What happened?” demanded Mr. Button, as he came up in a rush. “How is she? A boy? Who is it?” Doctor Keene seemed somewhat irritated.
“Is the child born?” begged Mr. Button.
Doctor Keene frowned. “Why, yes, I suppose so… ”
“Is my wife all right?”
“Yes.”
“Is it a boy or a girl?”
“I'll ask you to go and see for yourself!” Then he turned away muttering: “Do you imagine a case like this will help my professional reputation? One more would ruin me-ruin anybody.”
“What's the matter? Triplets?[74]” “No, not triplets! You can go and see for yourself. And get another doctor. I'm through with you! I don't want to see you or any of your relatives ever again! Goodbye!”
Without another word he climbed into his carriage and drove away.
Mr. Button stood there trembling from head to foot[75]. He had suddenly lost all desire to go into the Maryland Private Hospital for Ladies and Gentlemen-it was with the greatest difficulty that, a moment later, he forced himself to mount the steps and enter the front door.
A nurse was sitting behind a desk in the hall. Swallowing his shame, Mr. Button approached her.
“Good-morning. I–I am Mr. Button.”
A look of terror spread over the girl's face.
“I want to see my child,” said Mr. Button.
The nurse gave a little scream. “Oh-of course!” she cried hysterically. “Upstairs. Right upstairs. Go up!”
She pointed the direction, and Mr. Button began to mount to the second floor. In the upper hall he addressed another nurse who approached him. “I'm Mr. Button,” he managed to say. “I want to see my-”
“All right, Mr. Button,” she agreed in a hushed voice. “Very well! But the hospital will never have the ghost of its reputation after-”
“Hurry! I can't stand this!” “Come this way Mr. Button.”
He went after her. At the end of a long hall they reached a room. They entered. Ranged around the walls were half a dozen rolling cribs.
“Well,” gasped Mr. Button, “which is mine?”
“There!” said the nurse.
Mr. Button's eyes followed her pointing finger, and this is what he saw. Wrapped in a white blanket, in one of the cribs, there sat an old man apparently about seventy years old. His sparse hair was almost white[76], and he had a long smoke-coloured beard. He looked up at Mr. Button with a question in his eyes.
“Is this a hospital joke?
“It doesn't seem like a joke to us,” replied the nurse. “And that is most certainly your child.”
Mr. Button's closed his eyes, and then, opening them, looked again. There was no mistake-he was gazing at a man of seventy – a baby of seventy, a baby whose feet hung over the sides of the crib.
The old man suddenly spoke in a cracked voice. “Are you my father?” he demanded. “Because if you are,” went on the old man, “I wish you'd get me out of this place…”