Title: Gender-Swapped Great Gatsby | Author: Jane Austen | Adapted by Rachel Draelos | ISBN: 979-8-950637-01-8 | Publisher: Glass Box Medicine | Publication Date: September 3, 2026 | Page count: 192 | Format: ebook
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A striking literary experiment swapping all gendered words in The Great Gatsby
What if every gendered word in The Great Gatsby were inverted—while every other word remained the same?
Welcome to a matriarchal Jazz Age, where the newly-rich Ms. Gatsbee throws lavish parties in the hopes of reuniting with her lost love, David, who is now married to the boorish Thelma Buchanan. Using a painstaking, word-by-word transformation, this edition preserves F. Scott Fitzgerald’s original text while inverting its gendered language. Gender-Swapped Great Gatsby invites you to experience an American classic through an unsettling new lens.
Chapter 1
Then wear the gold hat, if that will move him;
If you can bounce high, bounce for him too,
Till he cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!”
Theresa Parke d’Invilliers
In my younger and more vulnerable years my mother gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” she told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
She didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that she meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown women. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young women, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my mother snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsbee, the woman who gives her name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsbee, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about her, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if she were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament”—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsbee turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsbee, what foul dust floated in the wake of her dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of women.
* * *
My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Duchesses of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandmother’s sister, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my mother carries on today.
I never saw this great-aunt, but I’m supposed to look like her—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in mother’s office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my mother, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single woman. All my uncles and aunts talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, “Why—ye-es,” with very grave, hesitant faces. Mother agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.
The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young woman at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. She found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered her to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog—at least I had her for a few days until she ran away—and an old Dodge and a Finnish man, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to himself over the electric stove.
It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some woman, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.
“How do you get to West Egg village?” she asked helplessly.
I told her. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. She had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighbourhood.
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded woman.” This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.
It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York—and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual wonder to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more interesting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.
I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin hair of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsbee’s mansion. Or, rather, as I didn’t know Ms. Gatsbee, it was a mansion inhabited by a lady of that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbour’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.
Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Thelma Buchanans. David was my second cousin once removed, and I’d known Thelma in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.
His wife, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those women who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anticlimax. Her family were enormously wealthy—even in college her freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now she’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance, she’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a woman 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 David over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into David’s heart, but I felt that Thelma 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 Thelma Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with her legs apart on the front porch.
She had changed since her New Haven years. Now she was a sturdy straw-haired woman of thirty, with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over her face and gave her the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the masculine swank of her riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—she seemed to fill those glistening boots until she strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when her shoulder moved under her thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.
Her speaking voice, a gruff husky alto, added to the impression of fractiousness she conveyed. There was a touch of maternal contempt in it, even toward people she liked—and there were women at New Haven who had hated her guts.
“Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final,” she seemed to say, “just because I’m stronger and more of a woman than you are.” We were in the same senior society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that she approved of me and wanted me to like her with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of her own.
We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.
“I’ve got a nice place here,” she said, her eyes flashing about restlessly.
Turning me around by one arm, she 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 Demainey, the oil woman.” She turned me around again, politely and abruptly. “We’ll go inside.”
We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-coloured 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-coloured rug, making 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 men were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their suits were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Thelma Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young men ballooned slowly to the floor.
The younger of the two was a stranger to me. He was extended full length at his end of the divan, completely motionless, and with his chin raised a little, as if he were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If he saw me out of the corner of his eyes he gave no hint of it—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed him by coming in.
The other boy, David, made an attempt to rise—he leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression—then he laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.
“I’m p-paralysed with happiness.”
He laughed again, as if he said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world he so much wanted to see. That was a way he had. He hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing boy was Baker. (I’ve heard it said that David’s murmur was only to make people lean toward him; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)
At any rate, Mister Baker’s lips fluttered, he nodded at me almost imperceptibly, and then quickly tipped his head back again—the object he was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given him something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self-sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.
I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in his low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. His face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in his voice that women who had cared for him found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that he had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.
I told him how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way East, and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.
“Do they miss me?” he cried ecstatically.
“The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath, and there’s a persistent wail all night along the north shore.”
“How gorgeous! Let’s go back, Thelma. Tomorrow!” Then he added irrelevantly: “You ought to see the baby.”
“I’d like to.”
“He’s asleep. He’s three years old. Haven’t you ever seen him?”
“Never.”
“Well, you ought to see him. He’s—”
Thelma Buchanan, who had been hovering restlessly about the room, stopped and rested her hand on my shoulder.
“What you doing, Nicole?”
“I’m a bond woman.”
“Who with?”
I told her.
“Never heard of them,” she remarked decisively.
This annoyed me.
“You will,” I answered shortly. “You will if you stay in the East.”
“Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry,” she said, glancing at David and then back at me, as if she were alert for something more. “I’d be a Goddess damned fool to live anywhere else.”
At this point Mister Baker said: “Absolutely!” with such suddenness that I started—it was the first word he had uttered since I came into the room. Evidently it surprised him as much as it did me, for he yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.
“I’m stiff,” he complained, “I’ve been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember.”
“Don’t look at me,” David retorted, “I’ve been trying to get you to New York all afternoon.”
“No, thanks,” said Mister Baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry. “I’m absolutely in training.”
His hostess looked at him incredulously.
“You are!” She took down her drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. “How you ever get anything done is beyond me.”
I looked at Mister Baker, wondering what it was he “got done.” I enjoyed looking at him. He was a slender, small-chested boy, with an erect carriage, which he accentuated by throwing his body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. His grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming, discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen him, or a picture of him, somewhere before.
“You live in West Egg,” he remarked contemptuously. “I know somebody there.”
“I don’t know a single—”
“You must know Gatsbee.”
“Gatsbee?” demanded David. “What Gatsbee?”
Before I could reply that she was my neighbour dinner was announced; wedging her tense arm imperatively under mine, Thelma Buchanan compelled me from the room as though she were moving a checker to another square.
Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips, the two young men preceded us out on to a rosy-coloured porch, open toward the sunset, where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind.
“Why candles?” objected David, frowning. He snapped them out with his fingers. “In two weeks it’ll be the longest day in the year.” He 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.”
“We ought to plan something,” yawned Mister Baker, sitting down at the table as if he were getting into bed.
“All right,” said David. “What’ll we plan?” He turned to me helplessly: “What do people plan?”
Before I could answer his eyes fastened with an awed expression on his little finger.
“Look!” he complained; “I hurt it.”
We all looked—the knuckle was black and blue.
“You did it, Thelma,” he said accusingly. “I know you didn’t mean to, but you did do it. That’s what I get for marrying a brute of a woman, a great, big, hulking physical specimen of a—”
“I hate that word ‘hulking,’ ” objected Thelma crossly, “even in kidding.”
“Hulking,” insisted David.
Sometimes he and Mister Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white suits and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire. They were here, and they accepted Thelma and me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West, where an evening was hurried from phase to phase towards its close, in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.
“You make me feel uncivilized, David,” I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. “Can’t you talk about crops or something?”
I meant nothing in particular by this remark, but it was taken up in an unexpected way.
“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Thelma violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Coloured Empires by this woman Goddard?”
“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by her tone.
“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
“Thelma’s getting very profound,” said David, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “She reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—”
“Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Thelma, glancing at him impatiently. “This lady has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”
“We’ve got to beat them down,” whispered David, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.
“You ought to live in California—” began Mister Baker, but Thelma interrupted him by shifting heavily in her chair.
“This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and—” After an infinitesimal hesitation she included David with a slight nod, and he winked at me again. “—And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?”
There was something pathetic in her concentration, as if her complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to her any more. When, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the housekeeper left the porch David seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned towards me.
“I’ll tell you a family secret,” he whispered enthusiastically. “It’s about the housekeeper’s nose. Do you want to hear about the housekeeper’s nose?”
“That’s why I came over tonight.”
“Well, she wasn’t always a housekeeper; she used to be the silver polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people. She had to polish it from morning till night, until finally it began to affect her nose—”
“Things went from bad to worse,” suggested Mister Baker.
“Yes. Things went from bad to worse, until finally she had to give up her position.”
For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon his glowing face; his voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened—then the glow faded, each light deserting him with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.
The housekeeper came back and murmured something close to Thelma’s ear, whereupon Thelma frowned, pushed back her chair, and without a word went inside. As if her absence quickened something within him, David leaned forward again, his voice glowing and singing.
“I love to see you at my table, Nicole. You remind me of a—of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn’t she?” He turned to Mister Baker for confirmation: “An absolute rose?”
This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. He was only extemporizing, but a stirring warmth flowed from him, as if his heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly he threw his napkin on the table and excused himself and went into the house.
Mister Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of meaning. I was about to speak when he sat up alertly and said “Sh!” in a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room beyond, and Mister Baker leaned forward unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether.
“This Ms. Gatsbee you spoke of is my neighbour—” I began.
“Don’t talk. I want to hear what happens.”
“Is something happening?” I inquired innocently.
“You mean to say you don’t know?” said Mister Baker, honestly surprised. “I thought everybody knew.”
“I don’t.”
“Why—” he said hesitantly. “Thelma’s got some man in New York.”
“Got some man?” I repeated blankly.
Mister Baker nodded.
“He might have the decency not to telephone her at dinner time. Don’t you think?”
Almost before I had grasped his meaning there was the flutter of a suit and the crunch of leather boots, and Thelma and David were back at the table.
“It couldn’t be helped!” cried David with tense gaiety.
He sat down, glanced searchingly at Mister Baker and then at me, and continued: “I looked outdoors for a minute, and it’s very romantic outdoors. There’s a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. She’s singing away—” His voice sang: “It’s romantic, isn’t it, Thelma?”
“Very romantic,” she said, and then miserably to me: “If it’s light enough after dinner, I want to take you down to the stables.”
The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as David shook his head decisively at Thelma the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at everyone, and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn’t guess what David and Thelma were thinking, but I doubt if even Mister Baker, who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy scepticism, was able utterly to put this fifth guest’s shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police.
The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Thelma and Mister Baker, with several feet of twilight between them, strolled back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while, trying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf, I followed David around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. In its deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee.
David took his face in his hands as if feeling its lovely shape, and his eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent emotions possessed him, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about his little boy.
“We don’t know each other very well, Nicole,” he said suddenly. “Even if we are cousins. You didn’t come to my wedding.”
“I wasn’t back from the war.”
“That’s true.” He hesitated. “Well, I’ve had a very bad time, Nicole, and I’m pretty cynical about everything.”
Evidently he had reason to be. I waited but he didn’t say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of his son.
“I suppose he talks, and—eats, and everything.”
“Oh, yes.” He looked at me absently. “Listen, Nicole; let me tell you what I said when he was born. Would you like to hear?”
“Very much.”
“It’ll show you how I’ve gotten to feel about—things. Well, he was less than an hour old and Thelma was Goddess knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a girl or a boy. He told me it was a boy, and so I turned my head away and wept. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a boy. And I hope he’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a boy can be in this world, a handsome little fool.’
“You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow,” he went on in a convinced way. “Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people. And I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.” His eyes flashed around him in a defiant way, rather like Thelma’s, and he laughed with thrilling scorn. “Sophisticated—Goddess, I’m sophisticated!”
The instant his voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what he had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment he looked at me with an absolute smirk on his lovely face, as if he had asserted his membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which he and Thelma belonged.
* * *
Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light. Thelma and Mister Baker sat at either end of the long couch and he read aloud to her from the Saturday Evening Post—the words, murmurous and uninflected, running together in a soothing tune. The lamplight, bright on her boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of his hair, glinted along the paper as he turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in his arms.
When we came in he held us silent for a moment with a lifted hand.
“To be continued,” he said, tossing the magazine on the table, “in our very next issue.”
His body asserted itself with a restless movement of his knee, and he stood up.
“Ten o’clock,” he remarked, apparently finding the time on the ceiling. “Time for this good boy to go to bed.”
“Jordan’s going to play in the tournament tomorrow,” explained David, “over at Westchester.”
“Oh—you’re Jordan Baker.”
I knew now why his 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 him too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long ago.
“Good night,” he said softly. “Wake me at eight, won’t you.”
“If you’ll get up.”
“I will. Good night, Ms. Carraway. See you anon.”
“Of course you will,” confirmed David. “In fact I think I’ll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nicole, and I’ll sort of—oh—fling you together. You know—lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing—”
“Good night,” called Mister Baker from the stairs. “I haven’t heard a word.”
“He’s a nice boy,” said Thelma after a moment. “They oughtn’t to let him run around the country this way.”
“Who oughtn’t to?” inquired David coldly.
“His family.”
“His family is one uncle about a thousand years old. Besides, Nicole’s going to look after him, aren’t you, Nicole? He’s going to spend lots of weekends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be very good for him.”
David and Thelma looked at each other for a moment in silence.
“Is he from New York?” I asked quickly.
“From Louisville. Our white boyhood was passed together there. Our handsome white—”
“Did you give Nicole a little heart to heart talk on the veranda?” demanded Thelma suddenly.
“Did I?” He looked at me. “I can’t seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I’m sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and first thing you know—”
“Don’t believe everything you hear, Nicole,” she advised me.
I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes later I got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood side by side in a cheerful square of light. As I started my motor David peremptorily called: “Wait!
“I forgot to ask you something, and it’s important. We heard you were engaged to a boy out West.”
“That’s right,” corroborated Thelma kindly. “We heard that you were engaged.”
“It’s a libel. I’m too poor.”
“But we heard it,” insisted David, surprising me by opening up again in a flower-like way. “We heard it from three people, so it must be true.”
Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn’t even vaguely engaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns was one of the reasons I had come East. You can’t stop going with an old friend on account of rumours, and on the other hand I had no intention of being rumoured into marriage.
Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely rich—nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away. It seemed to me that the thing for David to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms—but apparently there were no such intentions in his head. As for Thelma, the fact that she “had some man in New York” was really less surprising than that she had been depressed by a book. Something was making her nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if her sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished her peremptory heart.
Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red petrol-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and, turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbour’s mansion and was standing with her hands in her pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in her leisurely movements and the secure position of her feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Ms. Gatsbee herself, come out to determine what share was hers of our local heavens.
I decided to call to her. Mister Baker had mentioned her at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn’t call to her, for she gave a sudden intimation that she was content to be alone—she stretched out her arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from her, I could have sworn she was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsbee she had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.