第29天 ! 重返家乡

Oneof my most vivid memories is of coming back west from prep school and laterfrom college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago wouldgather in the old dim Union Station at six o'clock of a December evening with afew Chicago friends already caught up into their own holiday gayeties to bidthem a hasty goodbye. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from MissThis or That's and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overheadas we caught sight of old acquaintances and the matchings of invitations:

"Areyou going to the Ordways'? the Herseys'? the Schultzes'?" and the longgreen tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands.

Andlast the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroadlooking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.

Whenwe pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began tostretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights ofsmall Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into theair. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through thecold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for onestrange hour before we melted indistinguishably into it again.

That'smy middle west--not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns but thethrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bellsin the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windowson the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those longwinters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a citywhere dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name. I see nowthat this has been a story of the West, after all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy andJordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency incommon which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.

Evenwhen the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of itssuperiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with theirinterminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old--eventhen it had always for me a quality of distortion. West Egg especially stillfigures in my more fantastic dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundredhouses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen,overhanging sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men indress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies adrunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side,sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house--the wrong house.But no one knows the woman's name, and no one cares.

AfterGatsby's death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes'power of correction. So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the airand the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come backhome.

Therewas one thing to be done before I left, an awkward, unpleasant thing that perhapshad better have been let alone. But I wanted to leave things in order and notjust trust that obliging and indifferent sea to sweep my refuse away. I sawJordan Baker and talked over and around what had happened to us together andwhat had happened afterward to me, and she lay perfectly still listening in abig chair.

Shewas dressed to play golf and I remember thinking she looked like a goodillustration, her chin raised a little, jauntily, her hair the color of anautumn leaf, her face the same brown tint as the fingerless glove on her knee.When I had finished she told me without comment that she was engaged to anotherman. I doubted that though there were several she could have married at a nodof her head but I pretended to be surprised. For just a minute I wondered if Iwasn't making a mistake, then I thought it all over again quickly and got up tosay goodbye.

"Neverthelessyou did throw me over," said Jordan suddenly. "You threw me over onthe telephone. I don't give a damn about you now but it was a new experiencefor me and I felt a little dizzy for a while."

Weshook hands.

"Oh,and do you remember--" she added, "----a conversation we had onceabout driving a car?"

"Why--notexactly."

"Yousaid a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver?

Well,I met another bad driver, didn't I? I mean it was careless of me to make such awrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. Ithought it was your secret pride."

"I'mthirty," I said. "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call ithonor."

Shedidn't answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, Iturned away.

Oneafternoon late in October I saw Tom Buchanan. He was walking ahead of me alongFifth Avenue in his alert, aggressive way, his hands out a little from his bodyas if to fight off interference, his head moving sharply here and there,adapting itself to his restless eyes. Just as I slowed up to avoid overtakinghim he stopped and began frowning into the windows of a jewelry store. Suddenlyhe saw me and walked back holding out his hand.

"What'sthe matter, Nick? Do you object to shaking hands with me?"

"Yes.You know what I think of you."

"You'recrazy, Nick," he said quickly. "Crazy as hell. I don't know what'sthe matter with you."

"Tom,"I inquired, "what did you say to Wilson that afternoon?"

Hestared at me without a word and I knew I had guessed right about those missinghours. I started to turn away but he took a step after me and grabbed my arm.

"Itold him the truth," he said. "He came to the door while we weregetting ready to leave and when I sent down word that we weren't in he tried toforce his way upstairs. He was crazy enough to kill me if I hadn't told him whoowned the car. His hand was on a revolver in his pocket every minute he was inthe house----" He broke off defiantly.

"Whatif I did tell him? That fellow had it coming to him. He threw dust into youreyes just like he did in Daisy's but he was a tough one. He ran over Myrtlelike you'd run over a dog and never even stopped his car."

Therewas nothing I could say, except the one unutterable fact that it wasn't true.

"Andif you think I didn't have my share of suffering--look here, when I went togive up that flat and saw that damn box of dog biscuits sitting there on thesideboard I sat down and cried like a baby. By God it was awful----"

Icouldn't forgive him or like him but I saw that what he had done was, to him,entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused.

Theywere careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures andthen retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever itwas that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they hadmade....

Ishook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though Iwere talking to a child. Then he went into the jewelry store to buy a pearlnecklace--or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons--rid of my provincialsqueamishness forever.

Gatsby'shouse was still empty when I left--the grass on his lawn had grown as long asmine. One of the taxi drivers in the village never took a fare past theentrance gate without stopping for a minute and pointing inside; perhaps it washe who drove Daisy and Gatsby over to East Egg the night of the accident andperhaps he had made a story about it all his own. I didn't want to hear it andI avoided him when I got off the train.

Ispent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling partiesof his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and thelaughter faint and incessant from his garden and the cars going up and down hisdrive. One night I did hear a material car there and saw its lights stop at hisfront steps. But I didn't investigate. Probably it was some final guest who hadbeen away at the ends of the earth and didn't know that the party was over.

Onthe last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went overand looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the whitesteps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood outclearly in the moonlight and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along thestone. Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand.

Mostof the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights exceptthe shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound.

Andas the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away untilgradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors'eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world.

Itsvanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had oncepandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for atransitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence ofthis continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understoodnor desired, face to face for the last time in history with somethingcommensurate to his capacity for wonder.

Andas I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonderwhen he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He hadcome a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close thathe could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behindhim, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the darkfields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsbybelieved in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedesbefore us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will runfaster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning---- So we beaton, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.