“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.
“You’re one of that bunch that hangs around with Meyer Wolfsheim—that much I happen to know.
I’ve made a little investigation, into your affairs—and I’ll carry it further to-morrow.”
“You can suit yourself about that, old sport,” said Gatsby steadily.
“I found out what your ’drugstores’ were.”
He turned to us and spoke rapidly. “He and this Wolfsheim bought up a lot of side-street drugstores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter.
That’s one of his little stunts.
I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him, and I wasn’t far wrong.”
“What about it?” said Gatsby politely.
“I guess your friend Walter Chase wasn’t too proud to come in on it.”
“And you left him in the lurch, didn’t you?
You let him go to jail for a month over in New Jersey.
God!
You ought to hear Walter on the subject of you.”
“He came to us dead broke.
He was very glad to pick up some money, old sport.”
“Don’t you call me ’old sport’!” cried Tom.
Gatsby said nothing.
“Walter could have you up on the betting laws too, but Wolfsheim scared him into shutting his mouth.”
That unfamiliar yet recognizable look was back again in Gatsby’s face.
“That drugstore business was just small change,” continued Tom slowly, “but you’ve got something on now that Walter’s afraid to tell me about.”
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 v/as 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.”