Trimalchio by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Author:F. Scott Fitzgerald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

Chapter VII

It was about this time that an ambitious young reporter from New York arrived at Gatsby’s door one morning and asked him if he had anything to say.

“Anything to say about what?” inquired Gatsby politely.

“Why—any statement to give out.”

It transpired after a confused five minutes that the man had heard Gatsby’s name around his office in a connection which he either wouldn’t reveal or didn’t fully understand. It was his day off and with laudable initiative he had hurried out “to see.”

It was an accident, and yet the reporter’s instinct was right. Gatsby’s notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his hospitality and thus become authorities on his past, had increased all summer until he fell just short of being news. Contemporary legends such as the “underground pipe-line to Canada” attached themselves to him, and there was one persistent story that he didn’t live in a house at all but in a boat that looked like a house and was moved secretly up and down the Long Island shore. It was when curiosity was at the highest about him that his lights failed to go on one Saturday night—and as obscurely as it had begun his career as Trimalchio suddenly ended.

For several weeks I hadn’t seen him and I perceived gradually that the automobiles that turned expectantly into his drive stayed only a minute and then drove rather sulkily away. Wondering if he were ill I went over to find out—an unfamiliar butler with a villainous face squinted at me suspiciously from the open door.

“Is Mr. Gatsby ill?”

“Nope,” he answered, adding “sir” in a dilatory, grudging way.

“I hadn’t seen him and I was rather worried. Tell him Mr. Carraway came over from next door.”

“Who?” he demanded rudely.

“Carraway.”

“Carraway. All right, I’ll tell him.”

Abruptly he slammed the door.

It was my Finn who informed me that Gatsby had dismissed every servant in his house a week ago and replaced them with half a dozen others who never went into the village and who never exchanged a word with the tradesmen except to order supplies over the telephone. The grocery boy reported that the kitchen looked like a pigsty and the general opinion in the village was that the new people weren’t servants at all.

After that I watched for Gatsby, and found him several evenings later, coming across my own lawn. He had lost a little of his tan and his eyes were bright and tired. We sat down on a bench in the yard.

“Going away?” I asked.

“No, old sport. Why?”

“I hear you fired all your servants.”

He hesitated.

“Daisy comes over sometimes in the afternoon. And I wanted some people who wouldn’t gossip—until we decide what we’re going to do. These two towns are pretty close together.”

“Where’d you find these?” I inquired, determined to show no curiosity about Daisy.

“They’re some people Wolfshiem wanted to do something for,” he said vaguely.

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