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The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Chapter 9 - Part 3
One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o’clock of a December evening, with a few Chicago friends, already caught up into their own holiday gayeties, to bid them a hasty good-by. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-that’s and the chatter1 of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: “Are you going to the Ordways’? the Herseys’? the Schultzes’?” and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky2 yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.
When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace3 came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.
That’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly4 wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent5 from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings6 are still called through decades by a family’s name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed7 some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.
Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling8, swollen9 towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old—even then it had always for me a quality of distortion. West Egg, especially, still figures in my more fantastic dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque10, crouching11 under a sullen12, overhanging sky and a lustreless13 moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles14 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.
After Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes’ power of correction. So when the blue smoke of brittle15 leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided16 to come back home.
There was one thing to be done before I left, an awkward, unpleasant thing that perhaps had better have been let alone. But I wanted to leave things in order and not just trust that obliging and indifferent sea to sweep my refuse away. I saw Jordan Baker17 and talked over and around what had happened to us together, and what had happened afterward18 to me, and she lay perfectly19 still, listening, in a big chair.
She was dressed to play golf, and I remember thinking she looked like a good illustration, her chin raised a little jauntily20, her hair the color of an autumn leaf, her face the same brown tint21 as the fingerless glove on her knee. When I had finished she told me without comment that she was engaged to another man. I doubted that, though there were several she could have married at a nod of her head, but I pretended to be surprised. For just a minute I wondered if I wasn’t making a mistake, then I thought it all over again quickly and got up to say good-bye.
“Nevertheless you did throw me over,” said Jordan suddenly. “You threw me over on the telephone. I don’t give a damn about you now, but it was a new experience for me, and I felt a little dizzy for a while.”
We shook hands.
“Oh, and do you remember.”—she added——” a conversation we had once about driving a car?”
“Why—not exactly.”
“You said 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 a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward22 person. I thought it was your secret pride.”
“I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.”
She didn’t answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.
One afternoon late in October I saw Tom Buchanan. He was walking ahead of me along Fifth Avenue in his alert, aggressive way, his hands out a little from his body as 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 overtaking him he stopped and began frowning into the windows of a jewelry23 store. Suddenly he saw me and walked back, holding out his hand.
“What’s the matter, Nick? Do you object to shaking hands with me?”
“Yes. You know what I think of you.”
“You’re crazy, Nick,” he said quickly. “Crazy as hell. I don’t know what’s the matter with you.”
“Tom,” I inquired, “what did you say to Wilson that afternoon?” He stared at me without a word, and I knew I had guessed right about those missing hours. I started to turn away, but he took a step after me and grabbed my arm.
“I told him the truth,” he said. “He came to the door while we were getting ready to leave, and when I sent down word that we weren’t in he tried to force his way up-stairs. He was crazy enough to kill me if I hadn’t told him who owned the car. His hand was on a revolver in his pocket every minute he was in the house——” He broke off defiantly24. “What if I did tell him? That fellow had it coming to him. He threw dust into your eyes just like he did in Daisy’s, but he was a tough one. He ran over Myrtle like you’d run over a dog and never even stopped his car.”
There was nothing I could say, except the one unutterable fact that it wasn’t true.
“And if you think I didn’t have my share of suffering—look here, when I went to give up that flat and saw that damn box of dog biscuits sitting there on the sideboard, I sat down and cried like a baby. By God it was awful——”
I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely25 justified26. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. . . .
I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child. Then he went into the jewelry store to buy a pearl necklace—or perhaps only a pair of cuff27 buttons—rid of my provincial28 squeamishness forever.
Gatsby’s house was still empty when I left—the grass on his lawn had grown as long as mine. One of the taxi drivers in the village never took a fare past the entrance gate without stopping for a minute and pointing inside; perhaps it was he who drove Daisy and Gatsby over to East Egg the night of the accident, and perhaps he had made a story about it all his own. I didn’t want to hear it and I avoided him when I got off the train.
I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly29 that I could still hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant30, from his garden, and the cars going up and down his drive. One night I did hear a material car there, and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I didn’t investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over.
On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled31 by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased32 it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled33 out on the sand.
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered34 in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted35 moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic36 contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes37 before us. It eluded38 us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
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1
chatter
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| vi.／n.喋喋不休；短促尖叫；(牙齿)打战 | |
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murky
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| adj.黑暗的，朦胧的；adv.阴暗地，混浊地；n.阴暗；昏暗 | |
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brace
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| n. 支柱,曲柄,大括号; v. 绷紧,顶住,(为困难或坏事)做准备 | |
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holly
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| n.[植]冬青属灌木 | |
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complacent
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| adj.自满的；自鸣得意的 | |
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dwellings
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| n.住处，处所( dwelling的名词复数 ) | |
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possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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sprawling
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| adj.蔓生的，不规则地伸展的v.伸开四肢坐[躺]( sprawl的现在分词 )；蔓延；杂乱无序地拓展；四肢伸展坐着（或躺着） | |
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swollen
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| adj.肿大的，水涨的；v.使变大，肿胀 | |
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grotesque
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| adj.怪诞的，丑陋的；n.怪诞的图案，怪人（物） | |
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crouching
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| v.屈膝，蹲伏( crouch的现在分词 ) | |
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sullen
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| adj.愠怒的，闷闷不乐的，(天气等)阴沉的 | |
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lustreless
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| adj.无光泽的，无光彩的，平淡乏味的 | |
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dangles
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| 悬吊着( dangle的第三人称单数 )； 摆动不定； 用某事物诱惑…； 吊胃口 | |
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brittle
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| adj.易碎的；脆弱的；冷淡的；(声音)尖利的 | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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baker
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| n.面包师 | |
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afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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jauntily
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| adv.心满意足地；洋洋得意地；高兴地；活泼地 | |
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21
tint
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| n.淡色，浅色；染发剂；vt.着以淡淡的颜色 | |
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straightforward
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| adj.正直的，坦率的；易懂的，简单的 | |
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jewelry
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| n.（jewllery）（总称）珠宝 | |
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24
defiantly
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| adv.挑战地，大胆对抗地 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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26
justified
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| a.正当的，有理的 | |
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27
cuff
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| n.袖口；手铐；护腕；vt.用手铐铐；上袖口 | |
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28
provincial
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| adj.省的，地方的；n．外省人，乡下人 | |
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vividly
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| adv.清楚地，鲜明地，生动地 | |
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incessant
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| adj.不停的，连续的 | |
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31
scrawled
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| 乱涂，潦草地写( scrawl的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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erased
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| v.擦掉( erase的过去式和过去分词 )；抹去；清除 | |
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33
sprawled
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| v.伸开四肢坐[躺]( sprawl的过去式和过去分词)；蔓延；杂乱无序地拓展；四肢伸展坐着（或躺着） | |
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34
pandered
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| v.迎合（他人的低级趣味或淫欲）( pander的过去式和过去分词 )；纵容某人；迁就某事物 | |
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35
enchanted
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| adj. 被施魔法的，陶醉的，入迷的 动词enchant的过去式和过去分词 | |
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36
aesthetic
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| adj.美学的，审美的，有美感 | |
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37
recedes
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| v.逐渐远离( recede的第三人称单数 )；向后倾斜；自原处后退或避开别人的注视；尤指问题 | |
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38
eluded
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| v.（尤指机敏地）避开( elude的过去式和过去分词 )；逃避；躲避；使达不到 | |
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