“I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he said, nodding determinedly.
“She’ll see.”
He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.
His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was. …
… One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight.
They stopped here and turned toward each other.
Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year.
The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars.
Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.
His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own.
He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.
So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star.
Then he kissed her.
At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago.
For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air.
But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.
Chapter VII
It was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights in his house failed to go on one Saturday night—and, as obscurely as it had begun, his career as Trimalchio was over.
Only gradually did I become aware that the automobiles which turned expectantly into his drive stayed for just a minute and then drove sulkily away.
Wondering if he were sick I went over to find out—an unfamiliar butler with a villainous face squinted at me suspiciously from the door.
“Is Mr. Gatsby sick?”
“Nope.”
After a pause he added “sir” in a dilatory, grudging way.
“I hadn’t seen him around, and I was rather worried.
Tell him Mr. Carraway came over.”
“Who?” he demanded rudely.
“Carraway.”
“Carraway.
All right, I’ll tell him.”
Abruptly he slammed the door.
My Finn informed me that Gatsby had dismissed every servant in his house a week ago and replaced them with half a dozen others, who never went into West Egg Village to .be bribed by the tradesmen, but ordered moderate supplies over the telephone.
The grocery boy reported that the kitchen looked like a pigsty, and the general opinion in the village was that the new people weren’t servants at all.
Next day Gatsby called me on the phone.
“Going away?” I inquired.
“No, old sport.”
“I hear you fired all your servants.”
“I wanted somebody who wouldn’t gossip.
Daisy comes over quite often—in the afternoons.”
So the whole caravansary had fallen in like a card house at the disapproval in her eyes.
“They’re some people Wolfsheim wanted to do something for.
They’re all brothers and sisters.
They used to run a small hotel.”
“I see.”
He was calling up at Daisy’s request—would I come to lunch at her house to-morrow?
Miss Baker would be there.
Half an hour later Daisy herself telephoned and seemed relieved to find that I was coming.
Something was up. And yet I couldn’t believe that they would choose this occasion for a scene—especially for the rather harrowing scene that Gatsby had outlined in the garden.
The next day was broiling, almost the last, certainly the warmest, of the summer.
As my train emerged from the tunnel into sunlight, only the hot whistles of the National Biscuit Company broke the simmering hush at noon.