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“I want to speak to Daisy alone,” he insisted. “She's all excited now – ”
“Even alone I can't say I never loved Tom,” she admitted in a pitiful voice. “It wouldn't be true.”
“Of course it wouldn't,” agreed Tom.
She turned to her husband.
“As if it mattered to you,” she said.
“Of course it matters. I'm going to take better care of you from now on.”
“You don't understand,” said Gatsby, with a touch of panic. “You're not going to take care of her any more.”
“I'm not?” Tom opened his eyes wide and laughed. He could afford to control himself now. “Why's that?”
“Daisy's leaving you.”
“Nonsense.”
“I am, though,” she said with a visible effort.
“She's not leaving me!” Tom's words suddenly leaned down over Gatsby.
“Certainly not for a common swindler who'd have to steal the ring he put on her finger.”
“I won't stand this!” cried Daisy. “Oh, please let's get out.”
“Who are you, anyhow?” broke out Tom. “I've made a little investigation into your affairs. I found out what your 'drug stores' were.” He turned to us and spoke rapidly. “He sold alcohol over the counter.”
“What about it[60 - What about it? – И что из этого?], old sport?” said Gatsby politely.
“Don't you call me 'old sport'!” cried Tom.
I glanced at Daisy who was staring terrified between Gatsby and her husband and at Jordan who had begun to balance an invisible but absorbing object on the tip of her chin. Then I turned back to Gatsby – and was startled at his expression. He looked – and this is said in all contempt for the babbled slander of his garden – as if he had “killed a man.” For a moment the set of his face could be described in just that fantastic way.
It passed, and he began to talk excitedly to Daisy, denying everything, defending his name against accusations that had not been made. But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room.
The voice begged again to go.
“PLEASE, Tom! I can't stand this any more.”
Her frightened eyes told that whatever intentions, whatever courage she had had, were definitely gone.
“You two start on home, Daisy,” said Tom. “In Mr. Gatsby's car.”
She looked at Tom, alarmed now, but he insisted with magnanimous scorn.
“Go on. He won't annoy you. I think he realizes that his presumptuous little flirtation is over.”
They were gone, without a word, snapped out, made accidental, isolated, like ghosts even from our pity.
After a moment Tom got up and began wrapping the unopened bottle of whiskey in the towel.
“Want any of this stuff? Jordan?…Nick?”
I didn't answer.
“Nick?” He asked again.
“What?”
“Want any?”
“No… I just remembered that today's my birthday.”
I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous menacing road of a new decade.
It was seven o'clock when we got into the coupe with him and started for Long Island. Tom talked incessantly, exulting and laughing, but his voice was as remote from Jordan and me as the foreign clamor on the sidewalk or the tumult of the elevated overhead. Human sympathy has its limits and we were content to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind. Thirty – the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat's shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.
So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.
The young Greek Michaelis[61 - Michaelis – Михаэлис] 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 - I've got my wife locked in up there. – Там наверху я запер жену.],” 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 - had never seemed capable of such a statement – не казался способным на такое]. 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 business was over – всё было кончено].
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 - They're a rotten crowd. – Ничтожества, вот кто они.],” I shouted across the lawn. “You're worth the whole damn bunch put together[66 - You're worth the whole damn bunch put together. – Вы один стоите их всех, вместе взятых.].”
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 - were afterward traced – удалось позже проследить]. The police, on the strength of what he said[68 - on the strength of what he said – основываясь на словах] 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 - holocaust – искупительная жертва] was complete.
