| Gatsby's Death |
| At two o'clock Gatsby put on his
bathing suit and left
word with the butler that if anyone phoned word was to be brought to him
at the pool. He stopped at the garage for a pneumatic mattress that had
amused his guests during the summer, and the chauffeur helped him pump
it up. Then he gave instructions that the open car wasn't to be taken
out under any circumstances - and this was strange because the front
right fender needed repair.
Gatsby shouldered the mattress and started for the pool. Once he stopped and shifted it a little and the chauffer asked him if he needed help, but he shook his head and in a moment disappeared among the yellowing trees. No telephone message arrived but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o'clock - until long after there was anyone to give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about... like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees. The chauffeur - he was on of Wolfsheim's protégés - heard the shots - afterward he could only say that he hadn't thought anything much about them. I drove from the station directly to Gatsby's house and my rushing anxiously up the front steps was the first thing that alarmed anyone. But they knew then, I firmly believe. With scarcely a word said, four of us, the chauffeur, butler, gardener and I, hurried down to the pool. There was a faint, barely perceptible movement of the water as the fresh flow from one end urged its way toward the drain at the other. With little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves, the laden mattress moved irregularly down the pool. A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental burden. The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of a compass, a thin red circle in the water. It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson's body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete. |