The Great Gatsby | Page 4

warm windy evening I
drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarce-
ly knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I
expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial man-
sion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and
ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping
over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—final-
ly when it reached the house dri?fing 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 a?fernoon,
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 shi?fing when his shoulder
moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enor-
mous leverage—a cruel body.
His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the im-
pression 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,’

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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 motor boat that bumped the tide off shore.
‘It belonged to Demaine the oil man.’ He turned me
around again, politely and abruptly. ‘We’ll go inside.’
We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-
colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French
windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming
white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a
little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room,
blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags,
twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the
ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, mak-
ing a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.
The only completely stationary object in the room was an
enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed
up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both
in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if
they had just been blown back in a?fer a short flight around
the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to

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the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a pic-
ture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan
shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about
the room and the