The Great Gatsby Page #3

								

freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago
and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for
instance, he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake
Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was
wealthy enough to do that.

Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France for
no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully
wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a
permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe
it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift
on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of
some irrecoverable football game.

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East
Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house
was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white
Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at
the beach and ran towards the front door for a quarter of a mile,
jumping over sundials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when
it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though
from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French
windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm
windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with
his legs apart on the front porch.

He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy
straw-haired man of thirty, with a rather hard mouth and a
supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established
dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning
aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding
clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill
those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could
see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his
thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.

His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of
fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in
it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who
had hated his guts.

“Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final,” he seemed to
say, “just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.” We
were in the same senior society, and while we were never intimate I
always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like
him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.

“I’ve got a nice place here,” he said, his eyes flashing about
restlessly.

Turning me around by one arm, he moved a broad flat hand along the
front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half
acre of deep, pungent roses, and a snub-nosed motorboat that bumped
the tide offshore.

“It belonged to Demaine, the oil man.” He turned me around again,
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