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1I tried to go then, but they wouldn't hear of it; perhaps my presence made them feel more satisfactorily alone. "I know
2what we'll do," said Gatsby, "we'll have Klipspringer play the piano." He went out of the room calling "Ewing!" and
3returned in a few minutes accompanied by an embarrassed, slightly worn young man, with shell-rimmed glasses and scanty
4blond hair. He was now decently clothed in a "sport shirt," open at the neck, sneakers, and duck trousers of a nebulous
5hue. "Did we interrupt your exercise?" inquired Daisy politely. "I was asleep," cried Mr. Klipspringer, in a spasm of
6embarrassment. "That is, I'd been asleep. Then I got up …" "Klipspringer plays the piano," said Gatsby, cutting him off.
7"Don't you, Ewing, old sport?" "I don't play well. I don't--hardly play at all. I'm all out of prac--" "We'll go
8downstairs," interrupted Gatsby. He flipped a switch. The grey windows disappeared as the house glowed full of light. In
9the music-room Gatsby turned on a solitary lamp beside the piano. He lit Daisy's cigarette from a trembling match, and
10sat down with her on a couch far across the room, where there was no light save what the gleaming floor bounced in from
11the hall. When Klipspringer had played "The Love Nest" he turned around on the bench and searched unhappily for Gatsby
12in the gloom. "I'm all out of practice, you see. I told you I couldn't play. I'm all out of prac--" "Don't talk so much,
13old sport," commanded Gatsby. "Play!" "In the morning, In the evening, Ain't we got fun--" Outside the wind was loud and
14there was a faint flow of thunder along the Sound. All the lights were going on in West Egg now; the electric trains,
15men-carrying, were plunging home through the rain from New York. It was the hour of a profound human change, and
16excitement was generating on the air. "One thing's sure and nothing's surer The rich get richer and the poor
17get--children. In the meantime, In between time--" As I went over to say goodbye I saw that the expression of
18bewilderment had come back into Gatsby's face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his
19present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his
20dreams--not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond
21everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every
22bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly
23heart. As I watched him he adjusted himself a little, visibly. His hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low
24in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish
25warmth, because it couldn't be over-dreamed--that voice was a deathless song. They had forgotten me, but Daisy glanced
26up and held out her hand; Gatsby didn't know me now at all. I looked once more at them and they looked back at me,
27remotely, possessed by intense life. Then I went out of the room and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them
28there together. VI About this time an ambitious young reporter from New York arrived one morning at Gatsby's door and
29asked him if he had anything to say. "Anything to say about what?" inquired Gatsby politely. "Why--any statement to give
30out." It transpired after a confused five minutes that the man had heard Gatsby's name around his office in a connection
31which he either wouldn't reveal or didn't fully understand. This was his day off and with laudable initiative he had
32hurried out "to see." It was a random shot, and yet the reporter's instinct was right. Gatsby's notoriety, spread about
33by the hundreds who had accepted his hospitality and so become authorities upon his past, had increased all summer until
34he fell just short of being news. Contemporary legends such as the "underground pipeline to Canada" attached themselves
35to him, and there was one persistent story that he didn't live in a house at all, but in a boat that looked like a house
36and was moved secretly up and down the Long Island shore. Just why these inventions were a source of satisfaction to
37James Gatz of North Dakota, isn't easy to say. James Gatz--that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had
38changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career--when he saw
39Dan Cody's yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior. It was James Gatz who had been loafing along
40the beach that afternoon in a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas pants, but it was already Jay Gatsby who borrowed a
41rowboat, pulled out to the Tuolomee, and informed Cody that a wind might catch him and break him up in half an hour. I
42suppose he'd had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people--his
43imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long
44Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God--a phrase which, if it means anything, means
45just that--and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he
46invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he
47was faithful to the end. For over a year he had been beating his way along the south shore of Lake Superior as a
48clam-digger and a salmon-fisher or in any other capacity that brought him food and bed. His brown, hardening body lived
49naturally through the half-fierce, half-lazy work of the bracing days. He knew women early, and since they spoiled him
50he became contemptuous of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of the others because they were hysterical
51about things which in his overwhelming self-absorption he took for granted. But his heart was in a constant, turbulent
52riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun
53itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes
54upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene
55with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory
56hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing. An
57instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months before, to the small Lutheran College of St. Olaf's in
58southern Minnesota. He stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to
59destiny itself, and despising the janitor's work with which he was to pay his way through. Then he drifted back to Lake
60Superior, and he was still searching for something to do on the day that Dan Cody's yacht dropped anchor in the shallows
61alongshore. Cody was fifty years old then, a product of the Nevada silver fields, of the Yukon, of every rush for metal
62since seventy-five. The transactions in Montana copper that made him many times a millionaire found him physically
63robust but on the verge of soft-mindedness, and, suspecting this, an infinite number of women tried to separate him from
64his money. The none too savoury ramifications by which Ella Kaye, the newspaper woman, played Madame de Maintenon to his
65weakness and sent him to sea in a yacht, were common property of the turgid journalism in 1902. He had been coasting
66along all too hospitable shores for five years when he turned up as James Gatz's destiny in Little Girl Bay. To young
67Gatz, resting on his oars and looking up at the railed deck, that yacht represented all the beauty and glamour in the
68world. I suppose he smiled at Cody--he had probably discovered that people liked him when he smiled. At any rate Cody
69asked him a few questions (one of them elicited the brand new name) and found that he was quick and extravagantly
70ambitious. A few days later he took him to Duluth and bought him a blue coat, six pairs of white duck trousers, and a
71yachting cap. And when the Tuolomee left for the West Indies and the Barbary Coast, Gatsby left too.
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