The Great Gatsby (Annotated)

Product Information

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.”

If he’d of lived, he’d of been a great man. A man like James J. Hill. He’d of helped build up the country.” You’re morbid, George,” said his friend. “This has been a strain to you and you don’t know what you’re saying. You’d better try and sit quiet till morning.” Look here, old sport, you’ve got to get somebody for me. You’ve got to try hard. I can’t go through this alone.” I had talked with him perhaps half a dozen times in the past month and found, to my disappointment, that he had little to say: So my first impression, that he was a person of some undefined consequence, had gradually faded and he had become simply the proprietor of an elaborate road-house next door. You wouldn’t have to do any business with Wolfshiem.” Evidently he thought that I was shying away from the “gonnegtion” mentioned at lunch, but I assured him he was wrong. He waited a moment longer, hoping I’d begin a conversation, but I was too absorbed to be responsive, so he went unwillingly home.His house had never seemed so enormous to me as it did that night when we hunted through the great rooms for cigarettes . We pushed aside curtains that were like pavilions, and felt over innumerable feet of dark wal l for electric light switches — once I tumbled with a sort of splash upon the keys of a ghostly piano. There was an inexplicable amount of dust everywhere, and the rooms were musty, as though they hadn’t been aired for many days. I found the humidor on an unfamiliar table, with two stale, dry cigarettes inside. Throwing open the French windows of the drawing-room, we sat smoking out into the darkness.

Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life. I accepted a commission as first lieutenant when it began . In the Argonne Forest I took two machine-gun detachments so far forward that there was a half mile gap on either side of us where the infantry couldn’t advance. We stayed there two days and two nights, a hundred and thirty men with sixteen Lewis guns , and when the infantry came up at last they found the insignia of three German divisions among the piles of dead. I was promoted to be a major , and every Allied government gave me a decoration — even Montenegro , little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!” Wilson shook his head. His eyes narrowed and his mouth widened slightly with the ghost of a superior “Hm!” 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.” It’s pretty, isn’t it, old sport?” He jumped off to give me a better view. “Haven’t you ever seen it before?” On Sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages alongshore, the world and its mistress returned to Gatsby’s house and twinkled hilariously on his lawn.Tom Buchanan , who had been hovering restlessly about the room , stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder. 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 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.”

I knew now why her face was familiar — its pleasing contemptuous expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long ago. I was asleep,” cried Mr. Klipspringer, in a spasm of embarrassment. “That is, I’d BEEN asleep. Then I got up. . . .” I talked with Miss Baker,” I said after a moment. “I’m going to call up Daisy to-morrow and invite her over here to tea.” We both looked at the grass—there was a sharp line where my ragged lawn ended and the darker, well-kept expanse of his began. I suspected that he meant my grass. That night an obviously frightened person called up, and demanded to know who I was before he would give his name.

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 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.” He was reluctant to close the book, reading each item aloud and then looking eagerly at me. I think he rather expected me to copy down the list for my own use. It’s just a crazy old thing,” she said. “I just slip it on sometimes when I don’t care what I look like.” He wouldn’t say another word. His correctness grew on him as we neared the city. We passed Port Roosevelt , where there was a glimpse of red-belted ocean-goi Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls . They were never quite the same ones in physical person, but they were so identical one with another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before. I have forgotten their names—Jaqueline, I think, or else Consuela, or Gloria or Judy or June, and their last names were either the melodious names of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American capitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to be.