Trimalchio
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
CHAPTER VIII
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. We 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. I might have told him, but if he was clutching at some last hope I couldn’t bear to shake him free.
“You know, old sport, I haven’t got anything,” he said suddenly. “I thought for awhile I had a lot of things, but the truth is I’m empty, and I guess people feel it. That must be why they keep on making up things about me, so I won’t be so empty. I even make up things myself.” He looked at me frankly. “I’m not an Oxford man.”
“I know it.” I was glad that this tremendous detail was cleared up at last.
“I was only there a few months,” he continued unexpectedly. “A lot of the officers overseas had a chance to go there after the war.”
I wanted to slap him on the back. I had one of those renewals of complete faith in him that I had experienced before.
“I’ll tell you everything,” he broke out exuberantly. “The whole story. I’ve never told it to anyone before—not even Daisy. But I haven’t told many lies about it, either, only I’ve shifted things around a good deal to make people wonder.”
It was true, for example, that he had inherited money—but not from his parents, who were very needy and obscure, so much so that he had never really believed that they were his parents at all.
This sounds like a shoddy admission on his part but it wasn’t. I understood what he meant—the fact that he was born in indisputable wedlock had never convinced his imagination and what better right does a man possess than to invent his own antecedents? Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything at all, means just that. And he must be about his Father’s business, which was the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty. To this he was faithful till the end.
The part of his life he told me about began when he was fifteen, when the popular songs of those days began to assume for him a melancholy and romantic beauty. He attached them to reveries as transitory as themselves and attributed deep significance to melodies and phrases set down cynically in Tin-Pan Alley. For awhile these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination, reflecting with their contemporary glamour the gaudy universe in which he believed. They were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.
At sixteen, James Gatz—that was really, or at least legally, his name—was beating his way along the south shore of Lake Superior as a clam digger and a salmon fisher or in any other capacity that brought him food and bed. His brown hardening body lived naturally through the half fierce, half lazy work of the bracing days. He knew women early and as they spoiled him he became contemptuous of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of the others because they were hysterical about things which in his overwhelming self absorption he took for granted.
But his heart was in a constant turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. Plans affecting the destinies of great nations and gorgeous cities spun themselves out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace.
An instinct toward his future glory led him once when he was seventeen to the small Lutheran college of St. Olaf’s in northern Minnesota. He stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor’s work with which he was to pay his way through. Then he went back to Lake Superior intending to find regular employment and save enough to go east. He was still searching for something to do on the day that Dan Cody’s yacht dropped anchor in the shallows along shore.
Cody was fifty years old then, a product of the Nevada silver fields, of the Yukon, of every rush for metal since seventy-five. The transactions in Montana copper that made him many times a millionaire found him physically robust but on the verge of softmindedness, and suspecting this an indefinite number of women tried to separate him from his money. The none too savory ramifications by which Ella Kaye, the newspaper woman, played Madame de Maintenon to his weakness and sent him to sea in a yacht were common property of the gaudy journalism of 1902. He had been coasting along all too hospitable shores for five years when he turned up as James Gatz’s destiny in Little Girl Bay.
“I was loafing around the beach that morning, and I watched his boat come in to get water. I thought it was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen in my life, that boat, and I’d have given my shirt to go on board. Then I saw it was going to drop anchor over one of the worst flats along the shore—and the tide would be going out in a quarter of an hour. I borrowed a rowboat and pulled for the yacht, and told Dan Cody that he’d be broken up sure before noon. I had a hard time convincing him, but when I did he gave me ten silver dollars and invited me to lunch. He asked me my name and I told him it was Jay Gatsby—I had changed it the night before. He liked me and I liked him, so a couple of days later he took me to Duluth and bought me a blue coat and six pair of white duck trousers and a yachting cap. And when the “Tuolomee” left for the West Indies and the Barbary Coast I left too.”
He was employed in a vague personal capacity—while he stayed with Cody he was in turn secretary, steward, mate, skipper and even jailor, for Dan Cody sober knew what lavish doings Dan Cody drunk might soon be about and he provided for such contingencies by reposing more and more trust in Gatsby. The arrangement lasted five years during which the boat went three times around the continent. It might have lasted indefinitely except for the fact that Ella Kaye came on board one night in Boston and a week later Dan Cody inhospitably died.
I remembered the portrait of him in Gatsby’s bedroom, a grey florid man with a hard empty face—the pioneer debauchee who during one phase of American life brought back to the eastern seaboard the savage violence of the frontier brothel and saloon. I said as much and Gatsby nodded.
“That’s why I never drink much. Somebody had to run things so I got into the habit of letting booze alone. I had a long sober look at the others—sometimes the women used to rub champagne in my hair.”
“I suppose it was from him that you inherited money.”
“Twenty-five thousand. But I never got it. I was young then and I still don’t know exactly how they cheated me, old sport, but Ella Kaye got it all.
“That was in the spring of nineteen-thirteen,” he continued after a moment. “I didn’t have any luck for awhile after that.”
He frowned and obliterating five years with a vague gesture began to talk about the war.
“I was glad when the war came. For one thing I was dead broke. I got into the first officers’ camp, and they gave me a commission as first lieutenant. I enjoyed it, old sport, especially in the early morning, when we lined up for roll-call and you could still see the stars. I felt exhilarated like a kid again. I felt as if I could do anything—as if something absolutely wonderful was going to happen.”
At first like so many young men of those days he thought he would stay in the army permanently. He was serenely happy—the effort was so austere, the goal so definite and attainable. Then he was sent to a cantonment near Louisville where one night he went with some other officers to a country club dance. Within a week his exhilaration quickened to a new note, the dark lovely voice of Daisy Fay.
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. He was amazed at it—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 was his tent out at camp 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 motorcars 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. He knew that he was a nobody with an irrevealable past and that 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 in this case he had claimed to be the son of a millionaire, but he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he let her believe that he was a person from much the same strata 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.
But he didn’t despise himself—it didn’t turn out as he had imagined. He had intended, probably, to take what he could and go—but now he found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail. 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.
When they met again two days later it was Gatsby who was breathless, who was somehow betrayed. Her porch was bright with the bought luxury of star-shine; the wicker of the settee squeaked fashionably as she turned toward him and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth. She had caught a cold and made her voice huskier and more charming than ever and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware only of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.
***
“I can’t describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her. I felt as if there’d been a trick played on me. I went and told her part of the truth, sort of hoping that she’d throw me over—but it didn’t make any difference, because she was in love with me too. She seemed to think I knew a lot about life, and it was just because I knew different things from her. Then we took that walk together one night, and suddenly I decided that she was what my dreams had been about all along. That made it all right. I thought out my life over again with Daisy in it, trying to figure how we could marry and struggle along on so many dollars a month. I didn’t want to be great any more because I wouldn’t admit to myself that there could be anything better than having her. What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do, while I held her in my arms?”
On the last afternoon before he went abroad, he sat with Daisy in his lap for a long, silent time. It was a cold fall day with fire in the room and her cheeks flushed. Now and then she moved and he changed his arm a little and once he kissed her dark shining hair. The afternoon had made them tranquil for awhile as if to give them rest for whatever sadness the next day promised. They had never been closer in their month of love nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat’s shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.
***
He did well in the war. He was a captain before he went to the front and after the Argonne battles he got his majority and the command of the divisional machine guns. He had an instinct for the business and in a long war he might have gone far. After the armistice he tried frantically to get home but some complication or misunderstanding sent him to Oxford instead. He was worried now—there was a quality of nervous despair in Daisy’s letters. She didn’t see why he couldn’t come. She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.
For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes. All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the “Beale Street Blues” while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the grey tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor.
Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed. And all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately—and the decision must be made by some force—of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality—that was close at hand.
That force took shape in the middle of spring with the arrival of Tom Buchanan. There was a wholesome bulkiness about his person and his position and Daisy was flattered. Doubtless there was a certain struggle and a certain relief. The letter reached Gatsby while he was still at Oxford.
***
It was dawn now on Long Island and we went about opening the rest of the windows downstairs, filling the house with grey-turning, gold-turning light. The ghostly shadow of a tree fell abruptly across the dew and birds began to sing a little among the blue leaves. There was a slow pleasant movement in the air, scarcely a wind, promising a cool lovely day.
“It was almost a year before I managed to beat it into my head that I couldn’t have her,” went on Gatsby quietly, “but I convinced myself at last. I used to be glad that I wasn’t in society, old sport, because I never ran into anyone who knew her or was liable to mention her name.”
Once he had to go to Louisville on business; he stayed there a week walking the streets where their footsteps had clicked together through the November night and revisiting the quiet, out-of-the-way places where they had driven in her white car. Just as Daisy’s house had always seemed to him more mysterious and gay than other houses so his idea of the city itself, even though she was gone from it, was pervaded with a melancholy beauty.
He left feeling that if he had searched harder he might have found her—that he was leaving her behind. The Pullman car was hot. He went out to the open vestibule and sat down on the porter’s folding chair and the station slid away and the backs of unfamiliar buildings moved by. Then out into the spring fields, where a yellow trolley raced them for a minute with people in it who might once have seen the pale magic of her face along the casual street.
The track curved and now it was going away from the sun which, as it sank lower, seemed to spread itself in benediction over the vanishing city where she had drawn her breath. He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.
***
It was nine o’clock when we finished breakfast and went out on the porch. The night had made a sharp difference in the weather and there was an autumn flavor in the air. The gardener, the last one of Gastby’s old servants, came to the foot of the steps.
“Shall I drain the pool today, Mr. Gatsby? Leaves’ll start falling pretty soon and then there’s always trouble with the pipes.”
“Not now,” Gatsby answered. “Not today. I want to go in for awhile this afternoon.”
I looked at my watch and stood up.
“Twelve minutes to my train.”
I didn’t want to go to the city. I wasn’t worth a decent stroke of work but it was more than that—I didn’t want to leave Gatsby. I missed that train, and then another, before I could get myself away.
“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.” He looked at me anxiously as if he hoped I’d corroborate this.
“I suppose so.”
“Well, goodbye.”
We shook hands and I started away. Just before I reached the hedge I remembered something and turned around.
“They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted, across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
I’ve always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. First he laughed politely, then he accepted it for what it was worth and looked at me for a moment with an almost radiant smile. His gorgeous pink rag of a suit made a bright spot of color against the white steps and I thought of the night when I first came to his ancestral home three months before. The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption—and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them goodbye.
I thanked him for his hospitality. We were always thanking him for that—I and the others.
“Goodbye,” I called. “I enjoyed breakfast, Gatsby.”
***
Up in the city I tried for awhile to list the quotations on an interminable amount of stock, then I fell asleep in my swivel chair. Just before noon the phone woke me and I started up with sweat breaking out on my forehead. It was Jordan Baker; she often called me up at this hour because the uncertainty of her own movements between hotels and clubs and private houses made it hard to find her any other way. Usually her voice came over the wire as something fresh and cool as if a divot from some green golf links had come sailing in at the office window but this morning it seemed harsh and dry.
“I’ve left Daisy’s house,” she said. “I’m at Hempstead and I’m going down to Southampton this afternoon.”
Probably she had good reasons for leaving Daisy but the fact annoyed me and her next remark made me rigid.
“You weren’t so nice to me last night.”
“How could it have mattered then?”
Silence for a moment. Then—
“However—I want to see you.”
“I want to see you too.”
“Well, suppose I don’t go to Southampton and come into town this afternoon?”
“No—I don’t think this afternoon.”
“Very well.”
“It’s impossible this afternoon. Various——”
We talked like that for awhile and then abruptly we weren’t talking any longer. I don’t know which of us hung up with a sharp click but I know I didn’t care. I couldn’t have talked to her across a teatable that day if I never talked to her again in this world.
I called Gatsby’s house a few minutes later but the line was busy. I tried four times; finally an exasperated central told me the wire was being kept open for long distance from Detroit. Taking out my time-table I drew a small circle around the three-fifty train. Then I leaned back in my chair and tried to think. It was just noon.
***
When I passed the ashheaps on the train that morning I had crossed deliberately to the other side of the car. I supposed there’d be a curious crowd around there all day with little boys searching for dark spots in the dust and some garrulous man telling over and over what had happened until it became less and less real even to him and he could tell it no longer and Myrtle Wilson’s tragic achievement was forgotten. Now I want to go back a little and tell what happened at the garage after we left there the night before.
They had difficulty in locating the sister, Catherine. She must have broken her rule against drinking that night for when she arrived she was stupid with liquor and unable to understand that the ambulance had already gone to Flushing. When they convinced her of this she immediately fainted as if that was the intolerable part of the affair. Someone kind or curious took her in his car and drove her in the wake of her sister’s body.
Until long after midnight a changing crowd lapped up against the front of the garage while George Wilson rocked himself back and forth on the couch inside. For awhile the door of the office was open and everyone who came into the garage glanced irresistibly through it. Finally someone said it was a shame and closed the door. Michaelis and several other men were with him—first four or five men, later two or three men. Still later Michaelis had to ask the last stranger to wait there fifteen minutes longer while he went back to his own place and made a pot of coffee. After that he stayed there alone with Wilson until dawn.
About three o’clock the quality of Wilson’s incoherent muttering changed—he grew quieter and began to talk about the yellow car. He announced that he had a way of finding out who the yellow car belonged to, and then he blurted out that a month ago his wife had come from the city with her face bruised and a broken nose.
But when he heard himself say this he flinched and began to cry “Oh my God!” again in his groaning voice. Michaelis made a clumsy attempt to distract him.
“How long have you been married, George? Come on there, try and sit still a minute and answer my question. How long have you been married?”
“Twelve years.”
“Ever had any children? Come on, George, sit still—I asked you a question. Did you ever have any children?”
The hard brown beetles kept thudding against the dull light and whenever Michaelis heard a car go tearing along the road outside it sounded to him like the car that hadn’t stopped a few hours before. He didn’t like to go into the garage because the work bench was stained where the body had been lying so he moved uncomfortably around the office—he knew every object in it before morning—and from time to time sat down beside Wilson trying to keep him more quiet.
“Have you got a church you go to sometimes, George? Maybe even if you haven’t been there for a long time? Maybe I could call up the church and get a priest to come over and he could talk to you, see?”
“Don’t belong to any.”
“You ought to have a church, George, for times like this. You must have gone to church once. Didn’t you get married in a church? Listen, George, listen to me. Didn’t you get married in a church?”
“That was a long time ago.”
The effort of answering broke the rhythm of his rocking—for a moment he was silent. Then the same half cunning, half bewildered look came back into his faded eyes.
“Look in the drawer there,” he said, pointing at the desk.
“Which drawer?”
“That drawer—that one.”
Michaelis opened the drawer nearest his hand. There was nothing in it but a small expensive dog-leash made of leather and braided silver. It was apparently new.
“This?” he inquired, holding it up.
Wilson stared and nodded.
“I found it yesterday afternoon. She tried to tell me about it but I knew it was something funny.”
“You mean your wife bought it?”
“She had it wrapped in tissue paper on her bureau.”
Michaelis didn’t see anything odd in that and he gave Wilson a dozen reasons why his wife might have bought the dog-leash. But possibly Wilson had heard some of these same explanations before, from Myrtle, because he began saying “Oh my God!” again in a whisper—his comforter left several explanations in the air.
“Then he killed her,” said Wilson. His mouth dropped open suddenly.
“Who did?”
“I have a way of finding out.”
“You’re morbid, George,” said his friend. “This has been a strain to you and you don’t know what you’re saying. You’d better try and sit quiet till morning.”
“He murdered her.”
“It was an accident, George.”
Wilson shook his head. His eyes narrowed and his mouth widened slightly with the ghost of a superior “Hm!”
“I know,” he said definitely. “I’m one of these trusting fellas and I don’t think no harm to nobody, but when I get to know a thing I know it. It was the man in that car. She ran out to speak to him and he wouldn’t stop.”
Michaelis had seen this too but it hadn’t occurred to him that there was any special significance in it. He believed that Mrs. Wilson had been running away from her husband rather than trying to stop any particular car.
“How could she of been like that?”
“She’s a deep one,” said Wilson, as if that answered the question. “Ah-h-h——”
He began to rock again and Michaelis stood twisting the leash in his hand.
“Maybe you got some friend that I could telephone for, George?”
This was a forlorn hope—he was almost sure that Wilson had no friend: there was not enough of him for his wife. He was glad a little later when he noticed a change in the room, a blue quickening by the window, and realized that dawn wasn’t far off. About five o’clock it was blue enough outside to snap off the light.
Wilson’s glazed eyes turned to the ashheaps, where small grey clouds took on fantastic shape and scurried here and there in the faint dawn wind.
“I spoke to her,” he muttered, after a long silence. “I told her she might fool me but she couldn’t fool God. I took her to the window—” with an effort he got up and walked to the rear window and leaned with his face pressed against it, “—and I said ’God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me but you can’t fool God!’”
Standing behind him Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg which had just emerged pale and enormous from the dissolving night.
“God sees everything,” repeated Wilson.
“That’s an advertisement,” Michaelis assured him. Something made him turn away from the window and look back into the room. But Wilson stood there a long time, his face close to the window pane, nodding into the twilight.
***
By six o’clock Michaelis was worn out and grateful for the sound of a car stopping outside. It was one of the watchers of the night before who had promised to come back so he cooked breakfast for three which he and the other man ate together. Wilson was quieter now and 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 afterwards traced to Port Roosevelt and then to Gad’s Hill where he bought a sandwich that he didn’t eat and a cup of coffee. He must have been tired and walking slowly for he didn’t reach Gad’s Hill until noon. Thus far there was no difficulty in accounting for his time—there were boys who had seen a man “acting sort of crazy” and motorists at whom he stared oddly from the side of the road. Then for three hours he disappeared from view. The police, on the strength of what he said to Michaelis, that he “had a way of finding out,” supposed that he spent that time going from garage to garage thereabouts inquiring for a yellow car. On the other hand no garage man who had seen him ever came forward—and perhaps he had an easier, surer way of finding out what he wanted to know. 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 and left word with the butler that if anyone phoned word was to be brought to him at the pool. He stopped at the garage for a pneumatic mattress that had amused his guests during the summer, and the chauffeur helped him pump it full of air. The chauffeur thought that he was “very nervous”; he’d given positive orders that the car wasn’t to be taken out, and this seemed strange because the front right fender needed repair.
Gatsby shouldered the mattress and started for the pool. Once he stopped and shifted it a little and the chauffeur asked him if he needed help, but he shook his head and in a moment disappeared among the yellowing trees.
No telephone message arrived but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o’clock—until long after there was anyone to give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about… like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.
The chauffeur, one of Wolfshiem’s protegees, heard the shots—afterward he could only say that he hadn’t thought anything much about them. I drove from the station directly to Gatsby’s house and my rushing anxiously up the front steps was the first thing that alarmed anyone. But they knew then, I firmly believe. With scarcely a word said, four of us, the chauffeur, butler, gardener and I, hurried down to the pool.
There was a faint, scarcely perceptible movement of the water as the fresh flow from one end urged its way toward the drain at the other. With little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves, the laden mattress moved irregularly down the pool. A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental burden. The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing like the leg of a compass, a thin red circle in the water.
It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson’s body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete.
Next: chapter 9
.Published in Trimalchio (The Cambridge Edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald).