II

About halfway between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily

joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as

to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley

of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and

hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and

chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of

ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery

air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track,

gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the

ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable

cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift

endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T.

J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and

gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face,

but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass

over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set

them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then

sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved

away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun

and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.

The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and,

when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on

waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an

hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute, and it was

because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress.

The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His

acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular cafés

with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with

whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her, I had no desire

to meet her—but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one

afternoon, and when we stopped by the ash-heaps he jumped to his feet

and, taking hold of my elbow, literally forced me from the car.

“We’re getting off,” he insisted. “I want you to meet my girl.”

I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon, and his determination

to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption

was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do.

I followed him over a low whitewashed railroad fence, and we walked

back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg’s

persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of

yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact

Main Street ministering to it, and contiguous to absolutely nothing.

One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an

all-night restaurant, approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a

garage—Repairs. George B. Wilson. Cars bought and sold.—and I followed

Tom inside.

The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the

dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had

occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind, and that

sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead, when the

proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands

on a piece of waste. He was a blond, spiritless man, anaemic, and

faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his

light blue eyes.

“Hello, Wilson, old man,” said Tom, slapping him jovially on the

shoulder. “How’s business?”

“I can’t complain,” answered Wilson unconvincingly. “When are you

going to sell me that car?”

“Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.”

“Works pretty slow, don’t he?”

“No, he doesn’t,” said Tom coldly. “And if you feel that way about it,

maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.”

“I don’t mean that,” explained Wilson quickly. “I just meant—”

His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage.

Then I heard footsteps on a stairs, and in a moment the thickish

figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was

in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her flesh

sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark

blue crêpe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty, but there

was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of

her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and, walking

through her husband as if he were a ghost, shook hands with Tom,

looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips, and without

turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice:

“Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.”

“Oh, sure,” agreed Wilson hurriedly, and went toward the little

office, mingling immediately with the cement colour of the walls. A

white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled

everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom.

“I want to see you,” said Tom intently. “Get on the next train.”

“All right.”

“I’ll meet you by the newsstand on the lower level.”

She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with

two chairs from his office door.

We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days

before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was

setting torpedoes in a row along the railroad track.

“Terrible place, isn’t it,” said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor

Eckleburg.

“Awful.”

“It does her good to get away.”

“Doesn’t her husband object?”

“Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He’s so

dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.”

So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up together to New York—or not

quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom

deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might

be on the train.

She had changed her dress to a brown figured muslin, which stretched

tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in

New York. At the newsstand she bought a copy of Town Tattle and a

moving-picture magazine, and in the station drugstore some cold cream

and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echoing drive

she let four taxicabs drive away before she selected a new one,

lavender-coloured with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from

the mass of the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she

turned sharply from the window and, leaning forward, tapped on the

front glass.

“I want to get one of those dogs,” she said earnestly. “I want to get

one for the apartment. They’re nice to have—a dog.”

We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd resemblance to John

D. Rockefeller. In a basket swung from his neck cowered a dozen very

recent puppies of an indeterminate breed.

“What kind are they?” asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly, as he came to the

taxi-window.

“All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?”

“I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got

that kind?”

The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and

drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck.

“That’s no police dog,” said Tom.

“No, it’s not exactly a police dog,” said the man with disappointment

in his voice. “It’s more of an Airedale.” He passed his hand over the

brown washrag of a back. “Look at that coat. Some coat. That’s a dog

that’ll never bother you with catching cold.”

“I think it’s cute,” said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. “How much is

it?”

“That dog?” He looked at it admiringly. “That dog will cost you ten

dollars.”

The Airedale—undoubtedly there was an Airedale concerned in it

somewhere, though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and

settled down into Mrs. Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the

weatherproof coat with rapture.

“Is it a boy or a girl?” she asked delicately.

“That dog? That dog’s a boy.”

“It’s a bitch,” said Tom decisively. “Here’s your money. Go and buy

ten more dogs with it.”

We drove over to Fifth Avenue, warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the

summer Sunday afternoon. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a great

flock of white sheep turn the corner.

“Hold on,” I said, “I have to leave you here.”

“No you don’t,” interposed Tom quickly. “Myrtle’ll be hurt if you

don’t come up to the apartment. Won’t you, Myrtle?”

“Come on,” she urged. “I’ll telephone my sister Catherine. She’s said

to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.”

“Well, I’d like to, but—”

We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds.

At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of

apartment-houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the

neighbourhood, Mrs. Wilson gathered up her dog and her other

purchases, and went haughtily in.

“I’m going to have the McKees come up,” she announced as we rose in

the elevator. “And, of course, I got to call up my sister, too.”

The apartment was on the top floor—a small living-room, a small

dining-room, a small bedroom, and a bath. The living-room was crowded

to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for

it, so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of

ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an

over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock.

Looked at from a distance, however, the hen resolved itself into a

bonnet, and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the

room. Several old copies of Town Tattle lay on the table together with

a copy of Simon Called Peter, and some of the small scandal magazines

of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant

elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk, to which he

added on his own initiative a tin of large, hard dog biscuits—one of

which decomposed apathetically in the saucer of milk all

afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whisky from a locked

bureau door.

I have been drunk just twice in my life, and the second time was that

afternoon; so everything that happened has a dim, hazy cast over it,

although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful

sun. Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the

telephone; then there were no cigarettes, and I went out to buy some

at the drugstore on the corner. When I came back they had both

disappeared, so I sat down discreetly in the living-room and read a

chapter of Simon Called Peter—either it was terrible stuff or the

whisky distorted things, because it didn’t make any sense to me.

Just as Tom and Myrtle (after the first drink Mrs. Wilson and I called

each other by our first names) reappeared, company commenced to arrive

at the apartment door.

The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty,

with a solid, sticky bob of red hair, and a complexion powdered milky

white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more

rakish angle, but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the

old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about

there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets

jingled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary

haste, and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I

wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed

immoderately, repeated my question aloud, and told me she lived with a

girl friend at a hotel.

Mr. McKee was a pale, feminine man from the flat below. He had just

shaved, for there was a white spot of lather on his cheekbone, and he

was most respectful in his greeting to everyone in the room. He

informed me that he was in the “artistic game,” and I gathered later

that he was a photographer and had made the dim enlargement of

Mrs. Wilson’s mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall. His

wife was shrill, languid, handsome, and horrible. She told me with

pride that her husband had photographed her a hundred and twenty-seven

times since they had been married.

Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time before, and was now

attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream-coloured chiffon,

which gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room. With

the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a

change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage

was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her

assertions became more violently affected moment by moment, and as she

expanded the room grew smaller around her, until she seemed to be

revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.

“My dear,” she told her sister in a high, mincing shout, “most of

these fellas will cheat you every time. All they think of is money. I

had a woman up here last week to look at my feet, and when she gave me

the bill you’d of thought she had my appendicitis out.”

“What was the name of the woman?” asked Mrs. McKee.

“Mrs. Eberhardt. She goes around looking at people’s feet in their own

homes.”

“I like your dress,” remarked Mrs. McKee, “I think it’s adorable.”

Mrs. Wilson rejected the compliment by raising her eyebrow in disdain.

“It’s just a crazy old thing,” she said. “I just slip it on sometimes

when I don’t care what I look like.”

“But it looks wonderful on you, if you know what I mean,” pursued Mrs.

McKee. “If Chester could only get you in that pose I think he could

make something of it.”

We all looked in silence at Mrs. Wilson, who removed a strand of hair

from over her eyes and looked back at us with a brilliant smile. Mr.

McKee regarded her intently with his head on one side, and then moved

his hand back and forth slowly in front of his face.

“I should change the light,” he said after a moment. “I’d like to

bring out the modelling of the features. And I’d try to get hold of

all the back hair.”

“I wouldn’t think of changing the light,” cried Mrs. McKee. “I think

it’s—”

Her husband said “Sh!” and we all looked at the subject again,

whereupon Tom Buchanan yawned audibly and got to his feet.

“You McKees have something to drink,” he said. “Get some more ice and

mineral water, Myrtle, before everybody goes to sleep.”

“I told that boy about the ice.” Myrtle raised her eyebrows in despair

at the shiftlessness of the lower orders. “These people! You have to

keep after them all the time.”

She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to

the dog, kissed it with ecstasy, and swept into the kitchen, implying

that a dozen chefs awaited her orders there.

“I’ve done some nice things out on Long Island,” asserted Mr. McKee.

Tom looked at him blankly.

“Two of them we have framed downstairs.”

“Two what?” demanded Tom.

“Two studies. One of them I call Montauk Point—The Gulls, and the

other I call Montauk Point—The Sea.”

The sister Catherine sat down beside me on the couch.

“Do you live down on Long Island, too?” she inquired.

“I live at West Egg.”

“Really? I was down there at a party about a month ago. At a man named

Gatsby’s. Do you know him?”

“I live next door to him.”

“Well, they say he’s a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm’s. That’s

where all his money comes from.”

“Really?”

She nodded.

“I’m scared of him. I’d hate to have him get anything on me.”

This absorbing information about my neighbour was interrupted by Mrs.

McKee’s pointing suddenly at Catherine:

“Chester, I think you could do something with her,” she broke out, but

Mr. McKee only nodded in a bored way, and turned his attention to Tom.

“I’d like to do more work on Long Island, if I could get the entry.

All I ask is that they should give me a start.”

“Ask Myrtle,” said Tom, breaking into a short shout of laughter as

Mrs. Wilson entered with a tray. “She’ll give you a letter of

introduction, won’t you, Myrtle?”

“Do what?” she asked, startled.

“You’ll give McKee a letter of introduction to your husband, so he can

do some studies of him.” His lips moved silently for a moment as he

invented, “ ‘George B. Wilson at the Gasoline Pump,’ or something like

that.”

Catherine leaned close to me and whispered in my ear:

“Neither of them can stand the person they’re married to.”

“Can’t they?”

“Can’t stand them.” She looked at Myrtle and then at Tom. “What I say

is, why go on living with them if they can’t stand them? If I was them

I’d get a divorce and get married to each other right away.”

“Doesn’t she like Wilson either?”

The answer to this was unexpected. It came from Myrtle, who had

overheard the question, and it was violent and obscene.

“You see,” cried Catherine triumphantly. She lowered her voice again.

“It’s really his wife that’s keeping them apart. She’s a Catholic, and

they don’t believe in divorce.”

Daisy was not a Catholic, and I was a little shocked at the

elaborateness of the lie.

“When they do get married,” continued Catherine, “they’re going West

to live for a while until it blows over.”

“It’d be more discreet to go to Europe.”

“Oh, do you like Europe?” she exclaimed surprisingly. “I just got back

from Monte Carlo.”

“Really.”

“Just last year. I went over there with another girl.”

“Stay long?”

“No, we just went to Monte Carlo and back. We went by way of

Marseilles. We had over twelve hundred dollars when we started, but we

got gyped out of it all in two days in the private rooms. We had an

awful time getting back, I can tell you. God, how I hated that town!”

The late afternoon sky bloomed in the window for a moment like the

blue honey of the Mediterranean—then the shrill voice of Mrs. McKee

called me back into the room.

“I almost made a mistake, too,” she declared vigorously. “I almost

married a little kike who’d been after me for years. I knew he was

below me. Everybody kept saying to me: ‘Lucille, that man’s way below

you!’ But if I hadn’t met Chester, he’d of got me sure.”

“Yes, but listen,” said Myrtle Wilson, nodding her head up and down,

“at least you didn’t marry him.”

“I know I didn’t.”

“Well, I married him,” said Myrtle, ambiguously. “And that’s the

difference between your case and mine.”

“Why did you, Myrtle?” demanded Catherine. “Nobody forced you to.”

Myrtle considered.

“I married him because I thought he was a gentleman,” she said

finally. “I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn’t

fit to lick my shoe.”

“You were crazy about him for a while,” said Catherine.

“Crazy about him!” cried Myrtle incredulously. “Who said I was crazy

about him? I never was any more crazy about him than I was about that

man there.”

She pointed suddenly at me, and everyone looked at me accusingly. I

tried to show by my expression that I expected no affection.

“The only crazy I was was when I married him. I knew right away I made

a mistake. He borrowed somebody’s best suit to get married in, and

never even told me about it, and the man came after it one day when he

was out: ‘Oh, is that your suit?’ I said. ‘This is the first I ever

heard about it.’ But I gave it to him and then I lay down and cried to

beat the band all afternoon.”

“She really ought to get away from him,” resumed Catherine to me.

“They’ve been living over that garage for eleven years. And Tom’s the

first sweetie she ever had.”

The bottle of whisky—a second one—was now in constant demand by all

present, excepting Catherine, who “felt just as good on nothing at

all.” Tom rang for the janitor and sent him for some celebrated

sandwiches, which were a complete supper in themselves. I wanted to

get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight,

but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident

argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet

high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed

their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening

streets, and I saw him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and

without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible

variety of life.

Myrtle pulled her chair close to mine, and suddenly her warm breath

poured over me the story of her first meeting with Tom.

“It was on the two little seats facing each other that are always the

last ones left on the train. I was going up to New York to see my

sister and spend the night. He had on a dress suit and patent leather

shoes, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off him, but every time he looked

at me I had to pretend to be looking at the advertisement over his

head. When we came into the station he was next to me, and his white

shirtfront pressed against my arm, and so I told him I’d have to call

a policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so excited that when I got into

a taxi with him I didn’t hardly know I wasn’t getting into a subway

train. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live

forever; you can’t live forever.’ ”

She turned to Mrs. McKee and the room rang full of her artificial

laughter.

“My dear,” she cried, “I’m going to give you this dress as soon as I’m

through with it. I’ve got to get another one tomorrow. I’m going to

make a list of all the things I’ve got to get. A massage and a wave,

and a collar for the dog, and one of those cute little ashtrays where

you touch a spring, and a wreath with a black silk bow for mother’s

grave that’ll last all summer. I got to write down a list so I won’t

forget all the things I got to do.”

It was nine o’clock—almost immediately afterward I looked at my watch

and found it was ten. Mr. McKee was asleep on a chair with his fists

clenched in his lap, like a photograph of a man of action. Taking out

my handkerchief I wiped from his cheek the spot of dried lather that

had worried me all the afternoon.

The little dog was sitting on the table looking with blind eyes

through the smoke, and from time to time groaning faintly. People

disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost

each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet

away. Some time toward midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood

face to face discussing, in impassioned voices, whether Mrs. Wilson

had any right to mention Daisy’s name.

“Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!” shouted Mrs. Wilson. “I’ll say it whenever I

want to! Daisy! Dai—”

Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his

open hand.

Then there were bloody towels upon the bathroom floor, and women’s

voices scolding, and high over the confusion a long broken wail of

pain. Mr. McKee awoke from his doze and started in a daze toward the

door. When he had gone halfway he turned around and stared at the

scene—his wife and Catherine scolding and consoling as they stumbled

here and there among the crowded furniture with articles of aid, and

the despairing figure on the couch, bleeding fluently, and trying to

spread a copy of Town Tattle over the tapestry scenes of

Versailles. Then Mr. McKee turned and continued on out the door.

Taking my hat from the chandelier, I followed.

“Come to lunch some day,” he suggested, as we groaned down in the

elevator.

“Where?”

“Anywhere.”

“Keep your hands off the lever,” snapped the elevator boy.

“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. McKee with dignity, “I didn’t know I was

touching it.”

“All right,” I agreed, “I’ll be glad to.”

… I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the

sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.

“Beauty and the Beast … Loneliness … Old Grocery Horse … Brook’n

Bridge …”

Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the

Pennsylvania Station, staring at the morning Tribune, and waiting for

the four o’clock train.