The Great Gatsby - Chapter 1

Nick Carraway moves to West Egg and visits Daisy and Tom Buchanan. He learns of Tom’s affair and meets Gatsby, who gazes at a mysterious green light across the bay, symbolizing his longing for Daisy. Summary by Dream AudioBooks

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chapter one. In
my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me
some advice that I've been turning over in my mind
ever since. Whenever you feel at criticizing anyone, he told me,
just remember that all the people in this world haven't

(00:21):
had the advantages that you've had. He didn't say any more,
but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way,
and I understood that he meant a great deal more
than that. In consequence, I am inclined to reserve all judgments,
a habit that has opened up many curious natures to

(00:42):
me and also made me the victim of not a
few veteran boares. The abnormal mind is quick to detect
and attach itself to this quality when it appears in
a normal person. And so it came about that in
college I was unjustly accused of being a politician because
I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.

(01:06):
Most of the confidences were unsought. Frequently I have feigned
sleep preoccupation or a hostile levity when I realized by
some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on
the horizon. For the intimate revelations of young men, or
at least the terms in which they express them, are

(01:29):
usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is
a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little
afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my
father snobbishly suggested and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of

(01:49):
the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth. And
after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to
the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be
founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but
after a certain point, I don't care what it's founded on.

(02:11):
When I came back from the East last autumn, I
felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform
and at a sort of moral attention forever. I wanted
no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.
Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book,

(02:33):
was exempt from my reaction. Gatsby, who represented everything for
which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an
unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous
about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life,

(02:55):
as if he were related to one of those intricate
machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness
had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is
dignified under the name of the creative temperament. It was
an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as

(03:19):
I have never found in any other person, and which
it is not likely I shall ever find again. No
Gatsby turned out all right at the end. It is
what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the
wake of his dreams, that temporarily closed out my interest
in the abortive sorrows and short winded elations of men.

(03:45):
My family have been prominent, well to do people in
this middle western city for three generations. The Carraways are
something of a clan, and we have a tradition that
we are descended from the Dukes of Buckloich. But the
actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother, who
came here in fifty one, sent a substitute to the
Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my

(04:09):
father carries on to day. I never saw this great uncle,
but I'm supposed to look like him, with special reference
to the rather hard boiled painting that hangs in father's office.
I graduated from New Haven in nineteen fifteen, just a
quarter of a century after my father, and a little
later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as

(04:33):
the Great War. I enjoyed the counter raid so thoroughly
that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm
center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like
the ragged edge of the universe. So I decided to
go east and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew
was in the bond business, so I supposed it could

(04:55):
support one more single man. All my aunt's said, and
uncle's talked it over as if they were choosing a
prep school for me, and finally said, why yes, with
very grave hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for
a year, and after various delays, I came east permanently.

(05:18):
I thought in the spring of twenty two the practical
thing was to find rooms in the city, but it
was a warm season and I had just left a
country of wide lawns and friendly trees. So when a
young man at the office suggested that we take a
house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a

(05:39):
great idea. He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard
bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute
the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out
to the country alone. I had a dog, at least
I had him for a few days until he ran away,
and an old dodge, and a finish woman who made

(06:03):
my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered finish wisdom to
herself over the electric stove. It was lonely for a
day or so until one morning some man more recently
arrived than I stopped me on the road. How do
you get to West Egg Village, he asked, helplessly. I

(06:24):
told him, And as I walked on, I was lonely
no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler.
He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of
leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in

(06:47):
fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was
beginning over again with the summer. There was so much
to read, for one thing, and so much fine health
to be pulled down out of the young, breath giving air.
I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and

(07:08):
investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red
and gold, like new money from the mint, promising to
unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and
Mycenus knew. And I had the high intention of reading
many other books. Besides, I was rather literary in college.

(07:30):
One year I wrote a series of very solemn and
obvious editorials for the Yale News. And now I was
going to bring back all such things into my life
and become again that most limited of all specialists, the
well rounded man. This isn't just an epigram. Life is

(07:50):
much more successfully looked at from a single window. After all,
it was a matter of chance that I should have
rented a house in one of the strangest communities in
North America. It was on that slender, riotous island which
extends itself due east of New York, and where there are,
among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land twenty

(08:17):
miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical
in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay jot
out into the most domesticated body of salt water in
the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound.
They are not perfect ovals, like the egg in the

(08:40):
Columbus story. They are both crushed flat at the contact end,
but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual
confusion to the gulls that fly overhead to the wingless.
A more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular
except shape and size. I lived at West Egg, the well,

(09:05):
the less fashionable of the two, though this is a
most superficial tag to express the bazaar, and not a
little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the
very tip of the Egg, only fifty yards from the sound,
and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve

(09:25):
or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right
was a colossal affair by any standard. It was a
factual imitation of some hotel de Ville in Normandy, with
a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin
beard of raw ivy and a marble swimming pool, and

(09:46):
more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was
Gatsby's mansion, or rather, as I didn't know mister Gatsby,
it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name.
My own house was an eyesore, but it was a
small eyesore, and it had been overlooked. So I had

(10:08):
a view of the water, a partial view of my
neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires, all for
eighty dollars a month. Across the courtesy Bay. The white
palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and

(10:28):
the history of the summer really begins. On the evening
I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans.
Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I'd known
Tom in college, and just after the war I spent
two days with them in Chicago. Her husband, among various

(10:49):
physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends
that ever played football at New Haven and national figure
in a way, one of those men who reach such
an acute limited excellence at twenty one that everything afterward
savors of anticlimax. His family were enormously wealthy. Even in college,

(11:12):
his freedom with money was a matter for reproach. But
now he'd left Chicago and come East in a fashion
that rather took your breath away. For instance, he'd brought
down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It
was hard to realize that a man in my own
generation was wealthy enough to do that. Why they came east,

(11:35):
I don't know. They had spent a year in France
for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully,
wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was
a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone. But I
didn't believe it. I had no sight into Daisy's heart,

(11:57):
but I felt that Tom would drift on for ever,
seeking a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some
irrecoverable football game. And so it happened that on a warm,
windy evening, I drove over to East Egg to see
two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their

(12:18):
house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful,
red and white Georgian colonial mansion overlooking the Bay. The
lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front
door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sundials
and brick walks and burning gardens. Finally, when it reached

(12:38):
the house, drifting up the side in bright vines, as
though from the momentum of its run. The front was
broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with
reflected gold and wide open to the warm, windy afternoon.
And Tom Buchanan, in riding clothes, was standing with his
legs apart on the front porch. He had changed since

(13:04):
his new Haven years. Now he was a sturdy, straw
haired man of thirty, with a rather hard mouth and
a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance
over his face and gave him the appearance of always
leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his

(13:27):
riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body.
He seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained
the top lacing, and you could see a great pack
of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat.
It was a body capable of enormous leverage, a cruel body.

(13:50):
His speaking voice, a gruff, husky tenor, added to the
impression of fractiousness. He conveyed. There was a touch of
paternal contempt in it, even toward peaceople he liked, and
there were men at Newhaven who had hated his guts. Now,
don't think my opinion on these matters is final, he
seemed to say, just because I am stronger and more

(14:13):
of a man than you are. We were in the
same senior society, and while we were never intimate, I
always had the impression that he approved of me and
wanted me to like him, with some harsh, defiant wistfulness
of his own. We talked for a few minutes on
the sunny porch. I've got a nice place here, he said,

(14:38):
his eyes flashing about restlessly. Turning me around by one arm,
he moved a broad, flat hand along the front vista,
including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half
acre of deep pungent roses, and a snub nosed motor
boat that bumped the tide off shore. It belonged to Demane,

(15:01):
the oil man. He turned me around again, politely and abruptly.
We'll go inside. We walked through a high hallway into
a bright rosy colored space, fragilely bound into the house
by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar
and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed

(15:24):
to grow a little way into the house. A breeze
blew through the room blue curtains in at one end
and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up
toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling, and then
rippled over the wine colored rug, making a shadow on
it as wind does on the sea. The only completely

(15:49):
stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on
which two young women were buoyed up as though upon
an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their
dresses were rippling and fluttering, as if they had just
been blown back in after a short flight around the house.

(16:09):
I must have stood for a few moments, listening to
the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan
of a picture on the wall. Then there was a
boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows, and the
caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains
and the rugs, and the two young women ballooned slowly

(16:30):
to the floor. The younger of the two was a
stranger to me. She was extended full length at her
end of the divan, completely motionless, and with her chin
raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it,
which was quite likely to fall if she saw me
out of the corner of her eye. She gave no

(16:51):
hint of it. Indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring
an apology for having disturbed her by coming in. The
other girl, Daisy made an attempt to rise. She leaned
slightly forward with a conscientious expression. Then she laughed, an absurd,
charming little laugh, and I laughed too, and came forward

(17:13):
into the room. I'm paralyzed with happiness. She laughed again,
as if she said something very witty, and held my
hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising
that there was no one in the world she so
much wanted to see. That was a way she had.

(17:35):
She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the
balancing girl was Baker. I've heard it said that Daisy's
murmur was only to make people lean toward her, an
irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming at any rate.
Miss Baker's lips fluttered. She nodded at me, almost imperceptibly,

(17:56):
and then quickly tipped her head back again. The object
she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given
her something of affright again. A sort of apology arose
to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self sufficiency
draws a stunned tribute from me. I looked back at

(18:18):
my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low,
thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the
ear follows up and down, as if each speech is
an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.
Her face was sad and lovely, with bright things in it,
bright eyes and a bright, passionate mouth. But there was

(18:40):
an excitement in her voice that men who had cared
for her found difficult to forget, a singing compulsion, a
whispered listen, a promise that she had done gay exciting
things just a while since, and that there were gay
exciting things hovering in the next hour. I told her

(19:02):
how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day
on my way east, and how a dozen people had
sent their love through me. Do they miss me? She
cried ecstatically. The whole town is desolate. All the cars
have the left rear wheel painted black as a morning wreath.
And there's a persistent wail all night along the north shore.

(19:25):
How gorgeous. Let's go back tom tomorrow. Then she added irrelevantly.
You ought to see the baby. I'd like to. She's asleep,
she's three years old. Haven't you ever seen her? Never? Well,
you ought to see her. She's Tom Buchanan, who had

(19:50):
been hovering restlessly about the room, stopped and rested his
hand on my shoulder. What are you doing, Nick, I'm
a bond man who with I told him never heard
of them, he remarked decisively. This annoyed me. You will,

(20:12):
I answered shortly. You will if you stay in the east. Oh,
I'll stay in the East. Don't you worry, he said,
glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if
he were alert for something more. I'd be a goddamned
fool to live anywhere else. At this point, Miss Baker

(20:32):
said absolutely, with such suddenness that I started. It was
the first word she uttered since I came into the room. Evidently,
it surprised her as much as it did me, for
She yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements,
stood up into the room. I'm stiff, she complained. I've

(20:54):
been lying on that sofa for as long as I
can remember. Don't look at me, Daisy retorted, I've been
trying to get you to New York all afternoon. No thanks,
said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from
the pantry. I'm absolutely in training. Her host looked at

(21:15):
her incredulously. You are, He took down his drink as
if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass.
How you ever get anything done is beyond me. I
looked at Miss Baker, wondering what it was she got done.
I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small

(21:37):
breasted girl with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by
throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet.
Her gray, sun strained eyes looked back at me with polite,
reciprocal curiosity out of a wan charming, discontented face. It
occurred to me now that I had seen her, or

(21:58):
a picture of her somewhere before. You live in West egg,
she remarked, contemptuously. I know somebody there. I don't know
a single You must know Gatsby. Gatsby, demanded Daisy, what Gatsby?

(22:19):
Before I could reply that he was my neighbor, dinner
was announced. Wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine, Tom
Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were
moving a checker to another square. Slenderly, languidly, their hands
set lightly on their hips, the two young women preceded

(22:43):
us out on to a rosy colored porch open toward
the sunset, where four candles flickered on the table in
the diminished wind. Why candles, objected Daisy, frowning, she snapped
them out with her fingers. In two weeks, it'll be
the longest day in the year. She looked at us

(23:05):
all radiantly. Do you always watch for the longest day
of the year and then miss it? I always watch
for the longest day in the year and then miss it.
We ought to plan something, yawned Miss Baker, sitting down
at the table as if she were getting into bed.
All right, said Daisy, what'll we plan? She turned to

(23:27):
me helplessly, what do people plan? Before I could answer,
her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger. Look,
she complained, I heard it. We all looked. The knuckle
was black and blue. You did it, Tom, she said, accusingly.

(23:49):
I know you didn't mean to, but you did do it.
That's what I get for marrying a brute of a man,
a great, big, hulking physical specimen of a I hate
that word, hulking, objected Tom crossly. Even in kidding, Hulking,
insisted Daisy. Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once,

(24:13):
unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter,
that was as cool as their white dresses and their
impersonal eyes. In the absence of all desire. They were here,
and they accepted Tom and me making only a polite,
pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew

(24:36):
that presently dinner would be over, and a little later
the evening too would be over and casually put away.
It was sharply different from the West, where an evening
was hurried from phase to fase toward its close in
a continually disappointed anticipation, or else in sheer nervous dread
of the moment itself. You make me feel unsay civilized, Daisy,

(25:01):
I confessed, on my second glass of corky but rather impressive, Claret,
can't you talk about crops or something? I meant nothing
in particular by this remark, but it was taken up
in an unexpected way. Civilization's going to pieces, broke out
Tom violently. I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things.

(25:24):
Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by
this man Goddard? Why no, I answered, rather surprised by
his tone. Well, it's a fine book and everybody ought
to read it. The idea is, if we don't look out,
the white race will be we'll be utterly submerged. It's

(25:44):
all scientific stuff. It's been proved. Tom's getting very profound,
said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. He reads
deep books with long words in them. What was that word?
We Well, these books are all scientific, insisted Tom, glancing

(26:06):
at her impatiently. This fellow has worked out the whole thing.
It's up to us, who are that dominant race, to
watch out or these other races we'll have control of things.
We've got to beat them down, whispered Daisy, winking ferociously
toward the fervent sun. You ought to live in California,

(26:29):
began Miss Baker, but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily
in his chair. This idea is that we're Nordic's I am,
and you are, and you are. And after an infinitesimal hesitation,
he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked
at me again. And we've produced all the things that

(26:52):
go to make civilization. Oh, science and art and all that.
Do you see? There was something pathetic in his concentration,
as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was
not enough to him any more. When almost immediately the
telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch, Daisy

(27:15):
seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned toward me. I'll
tell you a family secret, she whispered enthusiastically. It's about
the butler's nose. Do you want to hear about the
butler's nose? That's why I came over to night. Well,

(27:36):
he wasn't always a butler. He used to be the
silver polisher for some people in New York that had
a silver service for two hundred people. He had to
polish it. From morning till night, until finally it began
to affect his nose. Things went from bad to worse,

(27:56):
suggested Miss Baker. Yes, things went from bad to worse,
until finally he had to give up his position for
a moment. The last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon
her glowing face. Her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as
I listened. Then the glow faded, each light, deserting her

(28:20):
with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street. At dusk,
the butler came back and murmured something close to Tom's ear,
whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair, and without a word,
went inside. As if his absence quickened something within her,

(28:41):
Daisy leaned forward again, her voice glowing and singing, I
love to see you at my table. Nick, you remind
me of a of a rose, an absolute rose, doesn't he?
She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation, an absolute rose.

(29:01):
This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose.
She was only extemporizing, but a stirring warmth flowed from her,
as if her heart was trying to come out to you,
concealed in one of those breathless thrilling words. Then suddenly
she threw her napkin on the table and excused herself

(29:23):
and went into the house. Miss Baker and I exchanged
a short glance, conspicuously devoid of meaning. I was about
to speak, when she sat up alertly and said sh
in a warning voice. A subdued, impassioned murmur was audible
in the room beyond, and Miss Baker leaned forward, unashamed,

(29:45):
trying to hear the murmur, trembled on the verge of coherence,
sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether. This, mister
Gatsby you spoke of, is my neighbor? I said, don't talk,
I want to hear what happens. Is something happening? I inquired, innocently.

(30:09):
You mean to say you don't know, said Miss Baker, honestly, surprised.
I thought everybody knew. I don't why, she said, hesitantly.
Tom's got some woman in New York, got some woman,
I repeated blankly. Miss Baker nodded she might have the

(30:32):
decency not to telephone him at dinner time, don't you think.
Almost before I had grasped her meaning, there was the
flutter of a dress and the crunch of leather boots,
and Tom and Daisy were back at the table. It
couldn't be helped, cried Daisy, with tense, gayety. She sat down,

(30:53):
glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me, and continued.
I looked out doors for a minute, and it's very
romantic outdoors. There's a bird on the lawn that I
think must be a nightingale. Come over on the Cunard
or White Star line. He's singing away. Her voice sang,
It's romantic, isn't it. Tom, Very romantic, he said, and

(31:18):
then miserably to me, if it's light enough after dinner,
I want to take you down to the stables. The
telephone rang inside startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head
decisively at Tom, the subject of the stables, in fact,
all subjects vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of

(31:41):
the last five minutes at table. I remember the candles
being lit again pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting
to look squarely at every one, and yet to avoid
all eyes. I couldn't guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking,
but I doubt if even Miss Baker, who seemed to
have mastered a certain hardy skepticism was able utterly to

(32:04):
put this fifth guest's shrill, metallic urgency out of mind.
To a certain temperament, the situation might have seemed intriguing.
My own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police.
The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom

(32:24):
and Miss Baker, with several feet of twilight between them,
strolled back into the library as if to a vigil,
beside a perfectly tangible body. While trying to look pleasantly
interested and a little deaf, I followed Daisy around a
chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front, in

(32:45):
its deep gloom, We sat down side by side on
a wicker settee. Daisy took her face in her hands,
as if feeling its lovely shape, and her eyes moved
gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent
emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would

(33:05):
be some sedative questions about her, little girl. We don't
know each other very well, Nick, she said suddenly, even
if we are cousins, you didn't come to my wedding.
I wasn't back from the war. That's true, she hesitated, Well,
I've had a very bad time, Nick, and I'm pretty

(33:27):
cynical about everything. Evidently she had reason to be. I waited,
but she didn't say any more, and after a moment
I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter.
I suppose she talks and eats and everything. Oh, yes,

(33:48):
she looked at me absently. Listen, Nick, let me tell
you what I said when she was born. Would you
like to hear very much? It'll show you how I've
gotten to feel about things. Well, she was less than
an hour old, and Tom was god knows where. I
woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned

(34:10):
feeling and asked the nurse right away if it was
a boy or a girl. She told me it was
a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept.
All right, I said, I'm glad it's a girl, and
I hope she'll be a fool. That's the best thing
a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

(34:31):
You see, I think everything's terrible. Anyhow, she went on
in a convinced way. Everybody thinks, so, the most advanced people.
And I know I've been everywhere and seen everything, and
done everything. Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way,
rather like Tom's, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. Sophisticated. God,

(34:54):
I'm sophisticated. The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to
compel my attention, my belief. I felt the basic insincerity
of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as
though the whole evening had been a trick of some
sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited,

(35:17):
and sure enough, in a moment, she looked at me
with an absolute smirk on her lovely face, as if
she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret
society to which she and Tom belonged. Inside the Crimson room,
bloomed with light, Tom and Miss Baker sat at either

(35:39):
end of the long couch, and she read aloud to
him from the Saturday Evening Post, the words murmurous and uninflected,
running together in a soothing tune. The lamp light bright
on his boots and dull on the autumn leaf. Yellow
of her hair glinted along the paper as she turned
a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms.

(36:05):
When we came in, she held us silent for a
moment with a lifted hand. To be continued, she said,
tossing the magazine on the table in our very next issue.
Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee,
and she stood up. Ten o'clock, she remarked, apparently finding

(36:29):
the time on the ceiling. Time for this good girl
to go to bed. Jordan's going to play in the
tournament tomorrow, explained Daisy over at Westchester, Oh, your Jordan Baker.
I knew now why her face was familiar. Its pleasing,
contemptuous expression had looked out at me from many rot

(36:52):
A Revere pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and
Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard some stone
of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it
was I had forgotten long ago. Good Night, she said, softly,
wake me at eight, won't you? If you'll get up?

(37:16):
I will, good night, mister Carraway see you Anon. Of
course you will, confirmed Daisy. In fact, I think I'll
arrange a marriage. Come over, off and Nick and I'll
sort of oh fling you together, you know, lock you
up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to
sea in a boat and all that sort of thing.

(37:37):
Good night, called miss Baker from the stairs. I haven't
heard a word. She's a nice girl, said Tom after
a moment. They oughtn't to let her run around the
country this way? Who oughtn't to, inquired Daisy coldly. Her family?

(37:59):
Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides,
Nick's going to look after her, aren't you, Nick. She's
going to spend lots of weekends out here this summer.
I think the home influence will be very good for her.
Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment
in silence. Is she from New York, i asked quickly.

(38:23):
From Louisville? Our white girlhood was passed together there, our
beautiful white Did you give Nick a little heart to
heart talk on the verandah, demanded Tom. Suddenly, did I?
She looked at me. I can't seem to remember, but
I think we talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I'm

(38:45):
sure we did. It sort of crept up on us.
And first thing, you know, don't believe everything you hear, Nick,
he advised me. I said lightly that I had heard
nothing at all, and a few minutes later I got
to go home. They came to the door with me
and stood side by side in a cheerful square of light.

(39:07):
As I started my motor, Daisy peremptorily called, wait, I
forgot to ask you something, and it's important. We heard
you were engaged to a girl out west. That's right,
corroborated Tom kindly, we heard that you were engaged. It's libel.
I'm too poor, but we heard it, insisted Daisy, surprising

(39:31):
me by opening up again in a flower like way.
We heard it from three people, so it must be true.
Of course I knew what they were referring to, but
I wasn't even vaguely engaged. The fact that Gossip had
published the bands was one of the reasons I had
come east. You can't stop going with an old friend

(39:53):
on account of rumors. And on the other hand, I
had no intention of being rumored into marriage. Their interest
rather touched me and made them less remotely rich. Nevertheless,
I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away.
It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to

(40:13):
do was to rush out of the house child in arms,
but apparently there were no such intentions in her head.
As for Tom, the fact that he had some woman
in New York was really less surprising than that he
had been depressed by a book. Something was making him
nibble at the edge of stale ideas, as if his

(40:36):
sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart. Already,
it was deep summer on road house roofs and in
front of wayside garages, where new red gas pumps sat
out in pools of light. And when I reached my
estate at West Egg, I ran the car under its
shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass

(41:00):
roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving
a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees
and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of
the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette
of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and turning
my head to watch it, I saw that I was

(41:22):
not alone. Fifty feet away, a figure had emerged from
the shadow of my neighbor's mansion and was standing with
his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of
the stars. Something in his leisurely movement and secure position
of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was
mister Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was

(41:45):
his of our local heavens. I decided to call to him.
Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would
do for an introduction. But I didn't call to him,
for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content
to be alone. He stretched out his arms toward the
dark water in a curious way, and far as I

(42:08):
was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling involuntarily.
I glanced seaward and distinguished nothing except a single green light,
minute and far away, that might have been at the
end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby,
he had vanished, and I was alone again in the

(42:30):
unquiet darkness. End of Chapter one