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How to check out a book
Yoast Version of the How-to block – (just to get you started…)
- Browse
First you need to browse for the kind of book you want! Don’t know what you want? Check out your local library.
Step 1: Browse
First you need to browse for the kind of book you want! Don’t know what you want? Check out your local library.
Step 2: Make Choice
It’s time to make your decision for what book you would like to read!
Step 3: Check Out
Go check out your book at the librarian’s desk!
Step 4: Enjoy
Enjoy your book đ remember to keep in mind the return date.
Step 5: Return
Return your book on time! Feel free to repeat.
THE GREAT GATSBY CHAPTER II
About halfway between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashesâa fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.
But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and giganticâtheir retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and, when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute, and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchananâs mistress.
The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular cafĂ©s with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her, I had no desire to meet herâbut I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon, and when we stopped by the ash-heaps he jumped to his feet and, taking hold of my elbow, literally forced me from the car.
âWeâre getting off,â he insisted. âI want you to meet my girl.â
I think heâd tanked up a good deal at luncheon, and his determination to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do.
I followed him over a low whitewashed railroad fence, and we walked back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburgâs persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it, and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night restaurant, approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garageâRepairs. George B. Wilson. Cars bought and sold.âand I followed Tom inside.
The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind, and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead, when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blond, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes.
âHello, Wilson, old man,â said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. âHowâs business?â
âI canât complain,â answered Wilson unconvincingly. âWhen are you going to sell me that car?â
âNext week; Iâve got my man working on it now.â
âWorks pretty slow, donât he?â
âNo, he doesnât,â said Tom coldly. âAnd if you feel that way about it, maybe Iâd better sell it somewhere else after all.â
âI donât mean that,â explained Wilson quickly. âI just meantââ
His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage. Then I heard footsteps on a stairs, and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crĂȘpe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty, but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and, walking through her husband as if he were a ghost, shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips, and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice:
âGet some chairs, why donât you, so somebody can sit down.â
âOh, sure,â agreed Wilson hurriedly, and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement colour of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinityâexcept his wife, who moved close to Tom.
âI want to see you,â said Tom intently. âGet on the next train.â
âAll right.â
âIâll meet you by the newsstand on the lower level.â
She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door.
We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row along the railroad track.
âTerrible place, isnât it,â said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg.
âAwful.â
âIt does her good to get away.â
âDoesnât her husband object?â
âWilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. Heâs so dumb he doesnât know heâs alive.â
So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up together to New Yorkâor not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train.
She had changed her dress to a brown figured muslin, which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York. At the newsstand she bought a copy of Town Tattle and a moving-picture magazine, and in the station drugstore some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echoing drive she let four taxicabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-coloured with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and, leaning forward, tapped on the front glass.
âI want to get one of those dogs,â she said earnestly. âI want to get one for the apartment. Theyâre nice to haveâa dog.â
We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd resemblance to John D. Rockefeller. In a basket swung from his neck cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an indeterminate breed.
âWhat kind are they?â asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly, as he came to the taxi-window.
âAll kinds. What kind do you want, lady?â
âIâd like to get one of those police dogs; I donât suppose you got that kind?â
The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck.
âThatâs no police dog,â said Tom.
âNo, itâs not exactly a police dog,â said the man with disappointment in his voice. âItâs more of an Airedale.â He passed his hand over the brown washrag of a back. âLook at that coat. Some coat. Thatâs a dog thatâll never bother you with catching cold.â
âI think itâs cute,â said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. âHow much is it?â
âThat dog?â He looked at it admiringly. âThat dog will cost you ten dollars.â
The Airedaleâundoubtedly there was an Airedale concerned in it somewhere, though its feet were startlingly whiteâchanged hands and settled down into Mrs. Wilsonâs lap, where she fondled the weatherproof coat with rapture.
âIs it a boy or a girl?â she asked delicately.
âThat dog? That dogâs a boy.â
âItâs a bitch,â said Tom decisively. âHereâs your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it.â
We drove over to Fifth Avenue, warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon. I wouldnât have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner.
âHold on,â I said, âI have to leave you here.â
âNo you donât,â interposed Tom quickly. âMyrtleâll be hurt if you donât come up to the apartment. Wonât you, Myrtle?â
âCome on,â she urged. âIâll telephone my sister Catherine. Sheâs said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.â
âWell, Iâd like to, butââ
We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment-houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighbourhood, Mrs. Wilson gathered up her dog and her other purchases, and went haughtily in.
âIâm going to have the McKees come up,â she announced as we rose in the elevator. âAnd, of course, I got to call up my sister, too.â
The apartment was on the top floorâa small living-room, a small dining-room, a small bedroom, and a bath. The living-room was crowded to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it, so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance, however, the hen resolved itself into a bonnet, and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room. Several old copies of Town Tattle lay on the table together with a copy of Simon Called Peter, and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk, to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large, hard dog biscuitsâone of which decomposed apathetically in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whisky from a locked bureau door.
I have been drunk just twice in my life, and the second time was that afternoon; so everything that happened has a dim, hazy cast over it, although until after eight oâclock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tomâs lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes, and I went out to buy some at the drugstore on the corner. When I came back they had both disappeared, so I sat down discreetly in the living-room and read a chapter of Simon Called Peterâeither it was terrible stuff or the whisky distorted things, because it didnât make any sense to me.
Just as Tom and Myrtle (after the first drink Mrs. Wilson and I called each other by our first names) reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door.
The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty, with a solid, sticky bob of red hair, and a complexion powdered milky white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle, but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jingled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste, and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud, and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel.
Mr. McKee was a pale, feminine man from the flat below. He had just shaved, for there was a white spot of lather on his cheekbone, and he was most respectful in his greeting to everyone in the room. He informed me that he was in the âartistic game,â and I gathered later that he was a photographer and had made the dim enlargement of Mrs. Wilsonâs mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall. His wife was shrill, languid, handsome, and horrible. She told me with pride that her husband had photographed her a hundred and twenty-seven times since they had been married.
Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time before, and was now attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream-coloured chiffon, which gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room. With the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment, and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her, until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.
âMy dear,â she told her sister in a high, mincing shout, âmost of these fellas will cheat you every time. All they think of is money. I had a woman up here last week to look at my feet, and when she gave me the bill youâd of thought she had my appendicitis out.â
âWhat was the name of the woman?â asked Mrs. McKee.
âMrs. Eberhardt. She goes around looking at peopleâs feet in their own homes.â
âI like your dress,â remarked Mrs. McKee, âI think itâs adorable.â
Mrs. Wilson rejected the compliment by raising her eyebrow in disdain.
âItâs just a crazy old thing,â she said. âI just slip it on sometimes when I donât care what I look like.â
âBut it looks wonderful on you, if you know what I mean,â pursued Mrs. McKee. âIf Chester could only get you in that pose I think he could make something of it.â
We all looked in silence at Mrs. Wilson, who removed a strand of hair from over her eyes and looked back at us with a brilliant smile. Mr. McKee regarded her intently with his head on one side, and then moved his hand back and forth slowly in front of his face.
âI should change the light,â he said after a moment. âIâd like to bring out the modelling of the features. And Iâd try to get hold of all the back hair.â
âI wouldnât think of changing the light,â cried Mrs. McKee. âI think itâsââ
Her husband said âSh!â and we all looked at the subject again, whereupon Tom Buchanan yawned audibly and got to his feet.
âYou McKees have something to drink,â he said. âGet some more ice and mineral water, Myrtle, before everybody goes to sleep.â
âI told that boy about the ice.â Myrtle raised her eyebrows in despair at the shiftlessness of the lower orders. âThese people! You have to keep after them all the time.â
She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy, and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs awaited her orders there.
âIâve done some nice things out on Long Island,â asserted Mr. McKee.
Tom looked at him blankly.
âTwo of them we have framed downstairs.â
âTwo what?â demanded Tom.
âTwo studies. One of them I call Montauk PointâThe Gulls, and the other I call Montauk PointâThe Sea.â
The sister Catherine sat down beside me on the couch.
âDo you live down on Long Island, too?â she inquired.
âI live at West Egg.â
âReally? I was down there at a party about a month ago. At a man named Gatsbyâs. Do you know him?â
âI live next door to him.â
âWell, they say heâs a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelmâs. Thatâs where all his money comes from.â
âReally?â
She nodded.
âIâm scared of him. Iâd hate to have him get anything on me.â
This absorbing information about my neighbour was interrupted by Mrs. McKeeâs pointing suddenly at Catherine:
âChester, I think you could do something with her,â she broke out, but Mr. McKee only nodded in a bored way, and turned his attention to Tom.
âIâd like to do more work on Long Island, if I could get the entry. All I ask is that they should give me a start.â
âAsk Myrtle,â said Tom, breaking into a short shout of laughter as Mrs. Wilson entered with a tray. âSheâll give you a letter of introduction, wonât you, Myrtle?â
âDo what?â she asked, startled.
âYouâll give McKee a letter of introduction to your husband, so he can do some studies of him.â His lips moved silently for a moment as he invented, âââGeorge B. Wilson at the Gasoline Pump,â or something like that.â
Catherine leaned close to me and whispered in my ear:
âNeither of them can stand the person theyâre married to.â
âCanât they?â
âCanât stand them.â She looked at Myrtle and then at Tom. âWhat I say is, why go on living with them if they canât stand them? If I was them Iâd get a divorce and get married to each other right away.â
âDoesnât she like Wilson either?â
The answer to this was unexpected. It came from Myrtle, who had overheard the question, and it was violent and obscene.
âYou see,â cried Catherine triumphantly. She lowered her voice again. âItâs really his wife thatâs keeping them apart. Sheâs a Catholic, and they donât believe in divorce.â
Daisy was not a Catholic, and I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie.
âWhen they do get married,â continued Catherine, âtheyâre going West to live for a while until it blows over.â
âItâd be more discreet to go to Europe.â
âOh, do you like Europe?â she exclaimed surprisingly. âI just got back from Monte Carlo.â
âReally.â
âJust last year. I went over there with another girl.â
âStay long?â
âNo, we just went to Monte Carlo and back. We went by way of Marseilles. We had over twelve hundred dollars when we started, but we got gyped out of it all in two days in the private rooms. We had an awful time getting back, I can tell you. God, how I hated that town!â
The late afternoon sky bloomed in the window for a moment like the blue honey of the Mediterraneanâthen the shrill voice of Mrs. McKee called me back into the room.
âI almost made a mistake, too,â she declared vigorously. âI almost married a little kike whoâd been after me for years. I knew he was below me. Everybody kept saying to me: âLucille, that manâs way below you!â But if I hadnât met Chester, heâd of got me sure.â
âYes, but listen,â said Myrtle Wilson, nodding her head up and down, âat least you didnât marry him.â
âI know I didnât.â
âWell, I married him,â said Myrtle, ambiguously. âAnd thatâs the difference between your case and mine.â
âWhy did you, Myrtle?â demanded Catherine. âNobody forced you to.â
Myrtle considered.
âI married him because I thought he was a gentleman,â she said finally. âI thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasnât fit to lick my shoe.â
âYou were crazy about him for a while,â said Catherine.
âCrazy about him!â cried Myrtle incredulously. âWho said I was crazy about him? I never was any more crazy about him than I was about that man there.â
She pointed suddenly at me, and everyone looked at me accusingly. I tried to show by my expression that I expected no affection.
âThe only crazy I was was when I married him. I knew right away I made a mistake. He borrowed somebodyâs best suit to get married in, and never even told me about it, and the man came after it one day when he was out: âOh, is that your suit?â I said. âThis is the first I ever heard about it.â But I gave it to him and then I lay down and cried to beat the band all afternoon.â
âShe really ought to get away from him,â resumed Catherine to me. âTheyâve been living over that garage for eleven years. And Tomâs the first sweetie she ever had.â
The bottle of whiskyâa second oneâwas now in constant demand by all present, excepting Catherine, who âfelt just as good on nothing at all.â Tom rang for the janitor and sent him for some celebrated sandwiches, which were a complete supper in themselves. I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I saw him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
Myrtle pulled her chair close to mine, and suddenly her warm breath poured over me the story of her first meeting with Tom.
âIt was on the two little seats facing each other that are always the last ones left on the train. I was going up to New York to see my sister and spend the night. He had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes, and I couldnât keep my eyes off him, but every time he looked at me I had to pretend to be looking at the advertisement over his head. When we came into the station he was next to me, and his white shirtfront pressed against my arm, and so I told him Iâd have to call a policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so excited that when I got into a taxi with him I didnât hardly know I wasnât getting into a subway train. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was âYou canât live forever; you canât live forever.âââ
She turned to Mrs. McKee and the room rang full of her artificial laughter.
âMy dear,â she cried, âIâm going to give you this dress as soon as Iâm through with it. Iâve got to get another one tomorrow. Iâm going to make a list of all the things Iâve got to get. A massage and a wave, and a collar for the dog, and one of those cute little ashtrays where you touch a spring, and a wreath with a black silk bow for motherâs grave thatâll last all summer. I got to write down a list so I wonât forget all the things I got to do.â
It was nine oâclockâalmost immediately afterward I looked at my watch and found it was ten. Mr. McKee was asleep on a chair with his fists clenched in his lap, like a photograph of a man of action. Taking out my handkerchief I wiped from his cheek the spot of dried lather that had worried me all the afternoon.
The little dog was sitting on the table looking with blind eyes through the smoke, and from time to time groaning faintly. People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away. Some time toward midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood face to face discussing, in impassioned voices, whether Mrs. Wilson had any right to mention Daisyâs name.
âDaisy! Daisy! Daisy!â shouted Mrs. Wilson. âIâll say it whenever I want to! Daisy! Daiââ
Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand.
Then there were bloody towels upon the bathroom floor, and womenâs voices scolding, and high over the confusion a long broken wail of pain. Mr. McKee awoke from his doze and started in a daze toward the door. When he had gone halfway he turned around and stared at the sceneâhis wife and Catherine scolding and consoling as they stumbled here and there among the crowded furniture with articles of aid, and the despairing figure on the couch, bleeding fluently, and trying to spread a copy of Town Tattle over the tapestry scenes of Versailles. Then Mr. McKee turned and continued on out the door. Taking my hat from the chandelier, I followed.
âCome to lunch some day,â he suggested, as we groaned down in the elevator.
âWhere?â
âAnywhere.â
âKeep your hands off the lever,â snapped the elevator boy.
âI beg your pardon,â said Mr. McKee with dignity, âI didnât know I was touching it.â
âAll right,â I agreed, âIâll be glad to.â
⊠I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.
âBeauty and the Beast⊠Loneliness⊠Old Grocery Horse⊠Brookân BridgeâŠâ
Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station, staring at the morning Tribune, and waiting for the four oâclock train.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott). âThe Great Gatsby.â The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Great Gatsby, 27 Feb. 2023, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/64317/pg64317-images.html#chapter-1.
THE GREAT GATSBY CHAPTER I
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that Iâve been turning over in my mind ever since.
âWhenever you feel like criticizing anyone,â he told me, âjust remember that all the people in this world havenât had the advantages that youâve had.â
He didnât say any more, but weâve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, Iâm 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 men. Most of the confidences were unsoughtâfrequently 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 men, 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 father 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 donât care what itâs 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 Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reactionâGatsby, 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 him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he 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 âcreative temperamentââit 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. NoâGatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
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 weâre descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfatherâs brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.
I never saw this great-uncle, but Iâm supposed to look like himâwith special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in fatherâs office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, 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 universeâso 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 man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, âWhyâye-es,â with very grave, hesitant faces. Father 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 man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dogâat least I had him for a few days until he ran awayâand an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.
It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.
âHow do you get to West Egg village?â he asked helplessly.
I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He 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 collegeâone year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale Newsâand now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the âwell-rounded man.â This isnât just an epigramâlife 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 Yorkâand 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 ovalsâlike the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact endâbut 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, theâwell, 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 standardâit was a factual imitation of some HĂŽtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsbyâs mansion. Or, rather, as I didnât know Mr. Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman 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 neighbourâs lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionairesâall 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 Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and Iâd known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.
Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Havenâa national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anticlimax. His family were enormously wealthyâeven in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproachâbut now heâd left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance, heâd 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 donât 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 didnât believe itâI had no sight into Daisyâs 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 gardensâfinally 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 bodyâhe 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 leverageâa 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 likedâand there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.
âNow, donât think my opinion on these matters is final,â he seemed to say, âjust because Iâm stronger and more of a man than you are.â 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.
âIâve got a nice place here,â 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.
âIt belonged to Demaine, the oil man.â He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. âWeâll go inside.â
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 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 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 Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.
The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless, and with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of itâindeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.
The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to riseâshe leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expressionâthen she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.
âIâm p-paralysed with happiness.â
She laughed again, as if she 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 she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (Iâve heard it said that Daisyâs murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)
At any rate, Miss Bakerâs lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly, and then quickly tipped her head back againâthe object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her 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 her 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. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered âListen,â a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.
I told her 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.
âDo they miss me?â she cried ecstatically.
âThe whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath, and thereâs a persistent wail all night along the north shore.â
âHow gorgeous! Letâs go back, Tom. Tomorrow!â Then she added irrelevantly: âYou ought to see the baby.â
âIâd like to.â
âSheâs asleep. Sheâs three years old. Havenât you ever seen her?â
âNever.â
âWell, you ought to see her. Sheâsââ
Tom Buchanan, who had been hovering restlessly about the room, stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.
âWhat you doing, Nick?â
âIâm a bond man.â
âWho with?â
I told him.
âNever heard of them,â he remarked decisively.
This annoyed me.
âYou will,â I answered shortly. âYou will if you stay in the East.â
âOh, Iâll stay in the East, donât you worry,â he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. âIâd be a God damned fool to live anywhere else.â
At this point Miss Baker said: âAbsolutely!â with such suddenness that I startedâit was the first word she had uttered since I came into the room. Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.
âIâm stiff,â she complained, âIâve been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember.â
âDonât look at me,â Daisy retorted, âIâve been trying to get you to New York all afternoon.â
âNo, thanks,â said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry. âIâm absolutely in training.â
Her host looked at her incredulously.
âYou are!â He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. âHow you ever get anything done is beyond me.â
I looked at Miss Baker, wondering what it was she âgot done.â I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her 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 her, or a picture of her, somewhere before.
âYou live in West Egg,â she remarked contemptuously. âI know somebody there.â
âI donât know a singleââ
âYou must know Gatsby.â
âGatsby?â demanded Daisy. âWhat Gatsby?â
Before I could reply that he was my neighbour dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine, Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.
Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips, the two young women preceded us out on to a rosy-coloured porch, open toward the sunset, where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind.
âWhy candles?â objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. âIn two weeks itâll be the longest day in the year.â She looked at us all radiantly. âDo 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.â
âWe ought to plan something,â yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed.
âAll right,â said Daisy. âWhatâll we plan?â She turned to me helplessly: âWhat do people plan?â
Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger.
âLook!â she complained; âI hurt it.â
We all lookedâthe knuckle was black and blue.
âYou did it, Tom,â she said accusingly. âI know you didnât mean to, but you did do it. Thatâs what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great, big, hulking physical specimen of aââ
âI hate that word âhulking,âââ objected Tom crossly, âeven in kidding.â
âHulking,â insisted Daisy.
Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire. They were here, and they accepted Tom 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.
âYou make me feel uncivilized, Daisy,â I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. âCanât you talk about crops or something?â
I meant nothing in particular by this remark, but it was taken up in an unexpected way.
âCivilizationâs going to pieces,â broke out Tom violently. âIâve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Coloured Empires by this man Goddard?â
âWhy, no,â I answered, rather surprised by his tone.
âWell, itâs a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we donât look out the white race will beâwill be utterly submerged. Itâs all scientific stuff; itâs been proved.â
âTomâs getting very profound,â said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. âHe reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word weââ
âWell, these books are all scientific,â insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. âThis fellow has worked out the whole thing. Itâs up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.â
âWeâve got to beat them down,â whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.
âYou ought to live in Californiaââ began Miss Baker, but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.
âThis idea is that weâre Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, andââ After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again. ââAnd weâve produced all the things that go to make civilizationâoh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?â
There was something pathetic in his concentration, as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more. When, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned towards me.
âIâll tell you a family secret,â she whispered enthusiastically. âItâs about the butlerâs nose. Do you want to hear about the butlerâs nose?â
âThatâs why I came over tonight.â
âWell, he wasnât always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people. He had to polish it from morning till night, until finally it began to affect his noseââ
âThings went from bad to worse,â suggested Miss Baker.
âYes. Things went from bad to worse, until finally he had to give up his position.â
For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listenedâthen the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.
The butler came back and murmured something close to Tomâs ear, whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair, and without a word went inside. As if his absence quickened something within her, Daisy leaned forward again, her voice glowing and singing.
âI love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of aâof a rose, an absolute rose. Doesnât he?â She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation: âAn absolute rose?â
This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only extemporizing, but a stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and excused herself and went into the house.
Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said âSh!â in a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room beyond, and Miss Baker leaned forward unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether.
âThis Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbourââ I began.
âDonât talk. I want to hear what happens.â
âIs something happening?â I inquired innocently.
âYou mean to say you donât know?â said Miss Baker, honestly surprised. âI thought everybody knew.â
âI donât.â
âWhyââ she said hesitantly. âTomâs got some woman in New York.â
âGot some woman?â I repeated blankly.
Miss Baker nodded.
âShe might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner time. Donât you think?â
Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a dress and the crunch of leather boots, and Tom and Daisy were back at the table.
âIt couldnât be helped!â cried Daisy with tense gaiety.
She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me, and continued: âI looked outdoors for a minute, and itâs very romantic outdoors. Thereâs a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. Heâs singing awayââ Her voice sang: âItâs romantic, isnât it, Tom?â
âVery romantic,â he said, and then miserably to me: âIf itâs light enough after dinner, I want to take you down to the stables.â
The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom 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 couldnât guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking, but I doubt if even Miss Baker, who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy scepticism, was able utterly to put this fifth guestâs shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguingâmy own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police.
The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss 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 Daisy 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.
Daisy took her face in her hands as if feeling its lovely shape, and her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl.
âWe donât know each other very well, Nick,â she said suddenly. âEven if we are cousins. You didnât come to my wedding.â
âI wasnât back from the war.â
âThatâs true.â She hesitated. âWell, Iâve had a very bad time, Nick, and Iâm pretty cynical about everything.â
Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didnât say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter.
âI suppose she talks, andâeats, and everything.â
âOh, yes.â She looked at me absently. âListen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?â
âVery much.â
âItâll show you how Iâve gotten to feel aboutâthings. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. âAll right,â I said, âIâm glad itâs a girl. And I hope sheâll be a foolâthatâs the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.â
âYou see I think everythingâs terrible anyhow,â she went on in a convinced way. âEverybody thinks soâthe most advanced people. And I know. Iâve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.â Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tomâs, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. âSophisticatedâGod, Iâm sophisticated!â
The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she 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 she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face, as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.
Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light. Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the long couch and she read aloud to him from the Saturday Evening Postâthe words, murmurous and uninflected, running together in a soothing tune. The lamplight, bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms.
When we came in she held us silent for a moment with a lifted hand.
âTo be continued,â she said, tossing the magazine on the table, âin our very next issue.â
Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she stood up.
âTen oâclock,â she remarked, apparently finding the time on the ceiling. âTime for this good girl to go to bed.â
âJordanâs going to play in the tournament tomorrow,â explained Daisy, âover at Westchester.â
âOhâyouâre Jordan Baker.â
I knew now why her face was familiarâits 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 her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long ago.
âGood night,â she said softly. âWake me at eight, wonât you.â
âIf youâll get up.â
âI will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon.â
âOf course you will,â confirmed Daisy. âIn fact I think Iâll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and Iâll sort ofâohâfling you together. You knowâlock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thingââ
âGood night,â called Miss Baker from the stairs. âI havenât heard a word.â
âSheâs a nice girl,â said Tom after a moment. âThey oughtnât to let her run around the country this way.â
âWho oughtnât to?â inquired Daisy coldly.
âHer family.â
âHer family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Nickâs going to look after her, arenât you, Nick? Sheâs going to spend lots of weekends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be very good for her.â
Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment in silence.
âIs she from New York?â I asked quickly.
âFrom Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our beautiful whiteââ
âDid you give Nick a little heart to heart talk on the veranda?â demanded Tom suddenly.
âDid I?â She looked at me. âI canât seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race. Yes, Iâm sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and first thing you knowââ
âDonât believe everything you hear, Nick,â he 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 Daisy peremptorily called: âWait!â
âI forgot to ask you something, and itâs important. We heard you were engaged to a girl out West.â
âThatâs right,â corroborated Tom kindly. âWe heard that you were engaged.â
âItâs a libel. Iâm too poor.â
âBut we heard it,â insisted Daisy, surprising me by opening up again in a flower-like way. âWe heard it from three people, so it must be true.â
Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasnât even vaguely engaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns was one of the reasons I had come East. You canât 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 richânevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in armsâbut apparently there were no such intentions in her head. As for Tom, the fact that he âhad some woman in New Yorkâ was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his 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 aloneâfifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbourâs mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.
I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didnât call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be aloneâhe stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seawardâand 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 Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott). âThe Great Gatsby.â The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Great Gatsby, 27 Feb. 2023, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/64317/pg64317-images.html#chapter-1.
PRIDE & PREJUDICE
CHAPTER II
R. BENNET was among the earliest of those who waited on Mr. Bingley. He had always intended to visit him, though to the last always assuring his wife that he should not go; and till the evening after the visit was paid she had no knowledge of it. It was then disclosed in the following manner. Observing his second daughter employed in trimming a hat, he suddenly addressed her with,â
âI hope Mr. Bingley will like it, Lizzy.â
âWe are not in a way to know what Mr. Bingley likes,â said her mother, resentfully, âsince we are not to visit.{7}â
âBut you forget, mamma,â said Elizabeth, âthat we shall meet him at the assemblies, and that Mrs. Long has promised to introduce him.â
âI do not believe Mrs. Long will do any such thing. She has two nieces of her own. She is a selfish, hypocritical woman, and I have no opinion of her.â
âNo more have I,â said Mr. Bennet; âand I am glad to find that you do not depend on her serving you.â
Mrs. Bennet deigned not to make any reply; but, unable to contain herself, began scolding one of her daughters.
âDonât keep coughing so, Kitty, for heavenâs sake! Have a little compassion on my nerves. You tear them to pieces.â
âKitty has no discretion in her coughs,â said her father; âshe times them ill.â
âI do not cough for my own amusement,â replied Kitty, fretfully. âWhen is your next ball to be, Lizzy?â
âTo-morrow fortnight.â
âAy, so it is,â cried her mother, âand Mrs. Long does not come back till the day before; so, it will be impossible for her to introduce him, for she will not know him herself.â
âThen, my dear, you may have the advantage of your friend, and introduce Mr. Bingley to her.â
âImpossible, Mr. Bennet, impossible, when I am not acquainted with him myself; how can you be so teasing?â
âI honour your circumspection. A fortnightâs acquaintance is certainly very little. One cannot know what a man really is by the end of a fortnight. But if we do not venture, somebody else will; and after all, Mrs. Long and her nieces must stand their chance; and, therefore,{8} as she will think it an act of kindness, if you decline the office, I will take it on myself.â
The girls stared at their father. Mrs. Bennet said only, âNonsense, nonsense!â
âWhat can be the meaning of that emphatic exclamation?â cried he. âDo you consider the forms of introduction, and the stress that is laid on them, as nonsense? I cannot quite agree with you there. What say you, Mary? For you are a young lady of deep reflection, I know, and read great books, and make extracts.â
Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.
âWhile Mary is adjusting her ideas,â he continued, âlet us return to Mr. Bingley.â
âI am sick of Mr. Bingley,â cried his wife.
âI am sorry to hear that; but why did you not tell me so before? If I had known as much this morning, I certainly would not have called on him. It is very unlucky; but as I have actually paid the visit, we cannot escape the acquaintance now.â
The astonishment of the ladies was just what he wishedâthat of Mrs. Bennet perhaps surpassing the rest; though when the first tumult of joy was over, she began to declare that it was what she had expected all the while.
âHow good it was in you, my dear Mr. Bennet! But I knew I should persuade you at last. I was sure you loved your girls too well to neglect such an acquaintance. Well, how pleased I am! And it is such a good joke, too, that you should have gone this morning, and never said a word about it till now.â
âNow, Kitty, you may cough as much as you choose,â said Mr. Bennet; and, as he spoke, he left the room, fatigued with the raptures of his wife.{9}
âWhat an excellent father you have, girls,â said she, when the door was shut. âI do not know how you will ever make him amends for his kindness; or me either, for that matter. At our time of life, it is not so pleasant, I can tell you, to be making new acquaintances every day; but for your sakes we would do anything. Lydia, my love, though you are the youngest, I dare say Mr. Bingley will dance with you at the next ball.â
âOh,â said Lydia, stoutly, âI am not afraid; for though I am the youngest, Iâm the tallest.â
The rest of the evening was spent in conjecturing how soon he would return Mr. Bennetâs visit, and determining when they should ask him to dinner.
âIâm the tallest{10}â
He rode a black horse.
Austen, Jane. âPride and Prejudice.â The Project Gutenberg EBook of Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen., 2022, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1342/1342-h/1342-h.htm#Chapter_I.
PRIDE & PREJUDICE
Chapter I.
IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
âMy dear Mr. Bennet,â said his lady to him one day, âhave you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?{2}â
Mr. Bennet replied that he had not.
âBut it is,â returned she; âfor Mrs. Long has just been here, and she told me all about it.â
Mr. Bennet made no answer.
âDo not you want to know who has taken it?â cried his wife, impatiently.
âYou want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it.â
âHe came down to see the placeâ
[Copyright 1894 by George Allen.]
This was invitation enough.
âWhy, my dear, you must know, Mrs. Long says that Netherfield is taken by a young man of large fortune from the north of England; that he came down on Monday in a chaise and four to see the place, and was so much delighted with it that he agreed with Mr. Morris immediately; that he is to take possession before Michaelmas, and some of his servants are to be in the house by the end of next week.{3}â
âWhat is his name?â
âBingley.â
âIs he married or single?â
âOh, single, my dear, to be sure! A single man of large fortune; four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls!â
âHow so? how can it affect them?â
âMy dear Mr. Bennet,â replied his wife, âhow can you be so tiresome? You must know that I am thinking of his marrying one of them.â
âIs that his design in settling here?â
âDesign? Nonsense, how can you talk so! But it is very likely that he may fall in love with one of them, and therefore you must visit him as soon as he comes.â
âI see no occasion for that. You and the girls may goâor you may send them by themselves, which perhaps will be still better; for as you are as handsome as any of them, Mr. Bingley might like you the best of the party.â
âMy dear, you flatter me. I certainly have had my share of beauty, but I do not pretend to be anything extraordinary now. When a woman has five grown-up daughters, she ought to give over thinking of her own beauty.â
âIn such cases, a woman has not often much beauty to think of.â
âBut, my dear, you must indeed go and see Mr. Bingley when he comes into the neighbourhood.â
âIt is more than I engage for, I assure you.â
âBut consider your daughters. Only think what an establishment it would be for one of them. Sir William and Lady Lucas are determined to go, merely on that account; for in general, you know, they visit no new{4} comers. Indeed you must go, for it will be impossible for us to visit him, if you do not.â
âYou are over scrupulous, surely. I dare say Mr. Bingley will be very glad to see you; and I will send a few lines by you to assure him of my hearty consent to his marrying whichever he chooses of the girlsâthough I must throw in a good word for my little Lizzy.â
âI desire you will do no such thing. Lizzy is not a bit better than the others: and I am sure she is not half so handsome as Jane, nor half so good-humoured as Lydia. But you are always giving her the preference.â
âThey have none of them much to recommend them,â replied he: âthey are all silly and ignorant like other girls; but Lizzy has something more of quickness than her sisters.â
âMr. Bennet, how can you abuse your own children in such a way? You take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion on my poor nerves.â
âYou mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these twenty years at least.â
âAh, you do not know what I suffer.â
âBut I hope you will get over it, and live to see many young men of four thousand a year come into the neighbourhood.â
âIt will be no use to us, if twenty such should come, since you will not visit them.â
âDepend upon it, my dear, that when there are twenty, I will visit them all.â
Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to{5} make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develope. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married: its solace was visiting and news.
Mr. & Mrs. Bennet
[Copyright 1894 by George Allen.]
I hope Mr. Bingley will like it.
Austen, Jane. âPride and Prejudice.â The Project Gutenberg EBook of Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen., 2022, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1342/1342-h/1342-h.htm#Chapter_I.
LITTLE WOMEN CHAPTER II
A MERRY CHRISTMAS.
Jo was the first to wake in the gray dawn of Christmas morning. No stockings hung at the fireplace, and for a moment she felt as much disappointed as she did long ago, when her little sock fell down because it was so crammed with goodies. Then she remembered her mother’s promise, and, slipping her hand under her pillow, drew out a little crimson-covered book. She knew it very well, for it was that beautiful old story of the best life ever lived, and Jo felt that it was a true guide-book for any pilgrim going the long journey. She woke 16Meg with a “Merry Christmas,” and bade her see what was under her pillow. A green-covered book appeared, with the same picture inside, and a few words written by their mother, which made their one present very precious in their eyes. Presently Beth and Amy woke, to rummage and find their little books also,âone dove-colored, the other blue; and all sat looking at and talking about them, while the east grew rosy with the coming day.
In spite of her small vanities, Margaret had a sweet and pious nature, which unconsciously influenced her sisters, especially Jo, who loved her very tenderly, and obeyed her because her advice was so gently given.
“Girls,” said Meg seriously, looking from the tumbled head beside her to the two little night-capped ones in the room beyond, “mother wants us to read and love and mind these books, and we must begin at once. We used to be faithful about it; but since father went away, and all this war trouble unsettled us, we have neglected many things. You can do as you please; but I shall keep my book on the table here, and read a little every morning as soon as I wake, for I know it will do me good, and help me through the day.”
Then she opened her new book and began to read. Jo put her arm round her, and, leaning cheek to cheek, read also, with the quiet expression so seldom seen on her restless face.
“How good Meg is! Come, Amy, let’s do as they do. I’ll help you with the hard words, and they’ll explain things if we don’t understand,” whispered Beth, very much impressed by the pretty books and her sisters’ example.
“I’m glad mine is blue,” said Amy; and then the rooms were very still while the pages were softly turned, and the winter sunshine crept in to touch the bright heads and serious faces with a Christmas greeting.
“Where is mother?” asked Meg, as she and Jo ran down to thank her for their gifts, half an hour later.
“Goodness only knows. Some poor creeter come a-beggin’, and your ma went straight off to see what was needed. There never was such a woman for givin’ away vittles and drink, clothes and firin’,” replied 17Hannah, who had lived with the family since Meg was born, and was considered by them all more as a friend than a servant.
“She will be back soon, I think; so fry your cakes, and have everything ready,” said Meg, looking over the presents which were collected in a basket and kept under the sofa, ready to be produced at the proper time. “Why, where is Amy’s bottle of cologne?” she added, as the little flask did not appear.
“She took it out a minute ago, and went off with it to put a ribbon on it, or some such notion,” replied Jo, dancing about the room to take the first stiffness off the new army-slippers.
“How nice my handkerchiefs look, don’t they? Hannah washed and ironed them for me, and I marked them all myself,” said Beth, looking proudly at the somewhat uneven letters which had cost her such labor.
“Bless the child! she’s gone and put ‘Mother’ on them instead of ‘M. March.’ How funny!” cried Jo, taking up one.
“Isn’t it right? I thought it was better to do it so, because Meg’s initials are ‘M. M.,’ and I don’t want any one to use these but Marmee,” said Beth, looking troubled.
“It’s all right, dear, and a very pretty idea,âquite sensible, too, for no one can ever mistake now. It will please her very much, I know,” said Meg, with a frown for Jo and a smile for Beth.
“There’s mother. Hide the basket, quick!” cried Jo, as a door slammed, and steps sounded in the hall.
Amy came in hastily, and looked rather abashed when she saw her sisters all waiting for her.
“Where have you been, and what are you hiding behind you?” asked Meg, surprised to see, by her hood and cloak, that lazy Amy had been out so early.
“Don’t laugh at me, Jo! I didn’t mean any one should know till the time came. I only meant to change the little bottle for a big one, and I gave all my money to get it, and I’m truly trying not to be selfish any more.”
As she spoke, Amy showed the handsome flask which replaced the cheap one; and looked so earnest and humble in her little effort to forget herself that Meg hugged her on the spot, and Jo pronounced 18her “a trump,” while Beth ran to the window, and picked her finest rose to ornament the stately bottle.
“You see I felt ashamed of my present, after reading and talking about being good this morning, so I ran round the corner and changed it the minute I was up: and I’m so glad, for mine is the handsomest now.”
Another bang of the street-door sent the basket under the sofa, and the girls to the table, eager for breakfast.
“Merry Christmas, Marmee! Many of them! Thank you for our books; we read some, and mean to every day,” they cried, in chorus.
“Merry Christmas, little daughters! I’m glad you began at once, and hope you will keep on. But I want to say one word before we sit down. Not far away from here lies a poor woman with a little new-born baby. Six children are huddled into one bed to keep from freezing, for they have no fire. There is nothing to eat over there; and the oldest boy came to tell me they were suffering hunger and cold. My girls, will you give them your breakfast as a Christmas present?”
They were all unusually hungry, having waited nearly an hour, and for a minute no one spoke; only a minute, for Jo exclaimed impetuously,â
“I’m so glad you came before we began!”
“May I go and help carry the things to the poor little children?” asked Beth, eagerly.
“I shall take the cream and the muffins,” added Amy, heroically giving up the articles she most liked.
Meg was already covering the buckwheats, and piling the bread into one big plate.
“I thought you’d do it,” said Mrs. March, smiling as if satisfied. “You shall all go and help me, and when we come back we will have bread and milk for breakfast, and make it up at dinner-time.”
They were soon ready, and the procession set out. Fortunately it was early, and they went through back streets, so few people saw them, and no one laughed at the queer party.
A poor, bare, miserable room it was, with broken windows, no fire, ragged bed-clothes, a sick mother, wailing baby, and a group of 19pale, hungry children cuddled under one old quilt, trying to keep warm.
How the big eyes stared and the blue lips smiled as the girls went in!
“Ach, mein Gott! it is good angels come to us!” said the poor woman, crying for joy.
“Funny angels in hoods and mittens,” said Jo, and set them laughing.
In a few minutes it really did seem as if kind spirits had been at work there. Hannah, who had carried wood, made a fire, and stopped up the broken panes with old hats and her own cloak. Mrs. March gave the mother tea and gruel, and comforted her with promises of help, while she dressed the little baby as tenderly as if it had been her own. The girls, meantime, spread the table, set the children round the fire, and fed them like so many hungry birds,âlaughing, talking, and trying to understand the funny broken English.
“Das ist gut!” “Die Engel-kinder!” cried the poor things, as they ate, and warmed their purple hands at the comfortable blaze.
20The girls had never been called angel children before, and thought it very agreeable, especially Jo, who had been considered a “Sancho” ever since she was born. That was a very happy breakfast, though they didn’t get any of it; and when they went away, leaving comfort behind, I think there were not in all the city four merrier people than the hungry little girls who gave away their breakfasts and contented themselves with bread and milk on Christmas morning.
“That’s loving our neighbor better than ourselves, and I like it,” said Meg, as they set out their presents, while their mother was upstairs collecting clothes for the poor Hummels.
Not a very splendid show, but there was a great deal of love done up in the few little bundles; and the tall vase of red roses, white chrysanthemums, and trailing vines, which stood in the middle, gave quite an elegant air to the table.
“She’s coming! Strike up, Beth! Open the door, Amy! Three cheers for Marmee!” cried Jo, prancing about, while Meg went to conduct mother to the seat of honor.
Beth played her gayest march, Amy threw open the door, and Meg enacted escort with great dignity. Mrs. March was both surprised and touched; and smiled with her eyes full as she examined her presents, and read the little notes which accompanied them. The slippers went on at once, a new handkerchief was slipped into her pocket, well scented with Amy’s cologne, the rose was fastened in her bosom, and the nice gloves were pronounced a “perfect fit.”
There was a good deal of laughing and kissing and explaining, in the simple, loving fashion which makes these home-festivals so pleasant at the time, so sweet to remember long afterward, and then all fell to work.
The morning charities and ceremonies took so much time that the rest of the day was devoted to preparations for the evening festivities. Being still too young to go often to the theatre, and not rich enough to afford any great outlay for private performances, the girls put their wits to work, andânecessity being the mother of invention,âmade whatever they needed. Very clever were some of their productions,âpasteboard guitars, antique lamps made of old-fashioned 21butter-boats covered with silver paper, gorgeous robes of old cotton, glittering with tin spangles from a pickle factory, and armor covered with the same useful diamond-shaped bits, left in sheets when the lids of tin preserve-pots were cut out. The furniture was used to being turned topsy-turvy, and the big chamber was the scene of many innocent revels.
No gentlemen were admitted; so Jo played male parts to her heart’s content, and took immense satisfaction in a pair of russet-leather boots given her by a friend, who knew a lady who knew an actor. These boots, an old foil, and a slashed doublet once used by an artist for some picture, were Jo’s chief treasures, and appeared on all occasions. The smallness of the company made it necessary for the two principal actors to take several parts apiece; and they certainly deserved some credit for the hard work they did in learning three or four different parts, whisking in and out of various costumes, and managing the stage besides. It was excellent drill for their memories, a harmless amusement, and employed many hours which otherwise would have been idle, lonely, or spent in less profitable society.
On Christmas night, a dozen girls piled on to the bed which was the dress-circle, and sat before the blue and yellow chintz curtains in a most flattering state of expectancy. There was a good deal of rustling and whispering behind the curtain, a trifle of lamp-smoke, and an occasional giggle from Amy, who was apt to get hysterical in the excitement of the moment. Presently a bell sounded, the curtains flew apart, and the Operatic Tragedy began.
“A gloomy wood,” according to the one play-bill, was represented by a few shrubs in pots, green baize on the floor, and a cave in the distance. This cave was made with a clothes-horse for a roof, bureaus for walls; and in it was a small furnace in full blast, with a black pot on it, and an old witch bending over it. The stage was dark, and the glow of the furnace had a fine effect, especially as real steam issued from the kettle when the witch took off the cover. A moment was allowed for the first thrill to subside; then Hugo, the villain, stalked in with a clanking sword at his side, a slouched hat, black beard, mysterious cloak, and the boots. After pacing to and fro in much 22agitation, he struck his forehead, and burst out in a wild strain, singing of his hatred to Roderigo, his love for Zara, and his pleasing resolution to kill the one and win the other. The gruff tones of Hugo’s voice, with an occasional shout when his feelings overcame him, were very impressive, and the audience applauded the moment he paused for breath. Bowing with the air of one accustomed to public praise, he stole to the cavern, and ordered Hagar to come forth with a commanding “What ho, minion! I need thee!”
Out came Meg, with gray horse-hair hanging about her face, a red and black robe, a staff, and cabalistic signs upon her cloak. Hugo demanded a potion to make Zara adore him, and one to destroy Roderigo. Hagar, in a fine dramatic melody, promised both, and proceeded to call up the spirit who would bring the love philter:â
“Hither, hither, from thy home,
Airy sprite, I bid thee come!
Born of roses, fed on dew,
Charms and potions canst thou brew?
Bring me here, with elfin speed,
The fragrant philter which I need;
Make it sweet and swift and strong,
Spirit, answer now my song!”
23
A soft strain of music sounded, and then at the back of the cave appeared a little figure in cloudy white, with glittering wings, golden hair, and a garland of roses on its head. Waving a wand, it sang,â
“Hither I come,
From my airy home,
Afar in the silver moon.
Take the magic spell,
And use it well,
Or its power will vanish soon!”
And, dropping a small, gilded bottle at the witch’s feet, the spirit vanished. Another chant from Hagar produced another apparition,ânot a lovely one; for, with a bang, an ugly black imp appeared, and, having croaked a reply, tossed a dark bottle at Hugo, and disappeared with a mocking laugh. Having warbled his thanks and put the potions in his boots, Hugo departed; and Hagar informed the audience that, as he had killed a few of her friends in times past, she has cursed him, and intends to thwart his plans, and be revenged on him. Then the curtain fell, and the audience reposed and ate candy while discussing the merits of the play.
A good deal of hammering went on before the curtain rose again; but when it became evident what a masterpiece of stage-carpentering had been got up, no one murmured at the delay. It was truly superb! A tower rose to the ceiling; half-way up appeared a window, with a lamp burning at it, and behind the white curtain appeared Zara in a lovely blue and silver dress, waiting for Roderigo. He came in gorgeous array, with plumed cap, red cloak, chestnut love-locks, a guitar, and the boots, of course. Kneeling at the foot of the tower, he sang 24a serenade in melting tones. Zara replied, and, after a musical dialogue, consented to fly. Then came the grand effect of the play. Roderigo produced a rope-ladder, with five steps to it, threw up one end, and invited Zara to descend. Timidly she crept from her lattice, put her hand on Roderigo’s shoulder, and was about to leap gracefully down, when, “Alas! alas for Zara!” she forgot her train,âit caught in the window; the tower tottered, leaned forward, fell with a crash, and buried the unhappy lovers in the ruins!
A universal shriek arose as the russet boots waved wildly from the wreck, and a golden head emerged, exclaiming, “I told you so! I told you so!” With wonderful presence of mind, Don Pedro, the cruel sire, rushed in, dragged out his daughter, with a hasty aside,â
“Don’t laugh! Act as if it was all right!”âand, ordering Roderigo up, banished him from the kingdom with wrath and scorn. Though decidedly shaken by the fall of the tower upon him, Roderigo defied the old gentleman, and refused to stir. This dauntless example fired Zara: she also defied her sire, and he ordered them both to the deepest dungeons of the castle. A stout little retainer came in with chains, and led them away, looking very much frightened, and evidently forgetting the speech he ought to have made.
Act third was the castle hall; and here Hagar appeared, having come to free the lovers and finish Hugo. She hears him coming, and hides; sees him put the potions into two cups of wine, and bid the timid little servant “Bear them to the captives in their cells, and tell them I shall come anon.” The servant takes Hugo aside to tell him something, and Hagar changes the cups for two others which are harmless. Ferdinando, the “minion,” carries them away, and Hagar puts back the cup which holds the poison meant for Roderigo. Hugo, getting thirsty after a long warble, drinks it, loses his wits, and, after a good deal of clutching and stamping, falls flat and dies; while Hagar informs him what she has done in a song of exquisite power and melody.
This was a truly thrilling scene, though some persons might have thought that the sudden tumbling down of a quantity of long hair rather marred the effect of the villain’s death. He was called before the curtain, and with great propriety appeared, leading Hagar, whose 25singing was considered more wonderful than all the rest of the performance put together.
Act fourth displayed the despairing Roderigo on the point of stabbing himself, because he has been told that Zara has deserted him. Just as the dagger is at his heart, a lovely song is sung under his window, informing him that Zara is true, but in danger, and he can save her, if he will. A key is thrown in, which unlocks the door, and in a spasm of rapture he tears off his chains, and rushes away to find and rescue his lady-love.
Act fifth opened with a stormy scene between Zara and Don Pedro. He wishes her to go into a convent, but she won’t hear of it; and, after a touching appeal, is about to faint, when Roderigo dashes in and demands her hand. Don Pedro refuses, because he is not rich. 26They shout and gesticulate tremendously, but cannot agree, and Roderigo is about to bear away the exhausted Zara, when the timid servant enters with a letter and a bag from Hagar, who has mysteriously disappeared. The latter informs the party that she bequeaths untold wealth to the young pair, and an awful doom to Don Pedro, if he doesn’t make them happy. The bag is opened, and several quarts of tin money shower down upon the stage, till it is quite glorified with the glitter. This entirely softens the “stern sire”: he consents without a murmur, all join in a joyful chorus, and the curtain falls upon the lovers kneeling to receive Don Pedro’s blessing in attitudes of the most romantic grace.
Tumultuous applause followed, but received an unexpected check; for the cot-bed, on which the “dress-circle” was built, suddenly shut up, and extinguished the enthusiastic audience. Roderigo and Don Pedro flew to the rescue, and all were taken out unhurt, though many were speechless with laughter. The excitement had hardly subsided, when Hannah appeared, with “Mrs. March’s compliments, and would the ladies walk down to supper.”
This was a surprise, even to the actors; and, when they saw the table, they looked at one another in rapturous amazement. It was like Marmee to get up a little treat for them; but anything so fine as this was unheard-of since the departed days of plenty. There was ice-cream,âactually two dishes of it, pink and white,âand cake and fruit and distracting French bonbons, and, in the middle of the table, four great bouquets of hot-house flowers!
It quite took their breath away; and they stared first at the table and then at their mother, who looked as if she enjoyed it immensely.
“Is it fairies?” asked Amy,
“It’s Santa Claus,” said Beth.
“Mother did it”; and Meg smiled her sweetest, in spite of her gray beard and white eyebrows.
“Aunt March had a good fit, and sent the supper,” cried Jo, with a sudden inspiration.
“All wrong. Old Mr. Laurence sent it,” replied Mrs. March.
“The Laurence boy’s grandfather! What in the world put such a thing into his head? We don’t know him!” exclaimed Meg.
27″Hannah told one of his servants about your breakfast party. He is an odd old gentleman, but that pleased him. He knew my father, years ago; and he sent me a polite note this afternoon, saying he hoped I would allow him to express his friendly feeling toward my children by sending them a few trifles in honor of the day. I could not refuse; and so you have a little feast at night to make up for the bread-and-milk breakfast.”
“That boy put it into his head, I know he did! He’s a capital fellow, and I wish we could get acquainted. He looks as if he’d like to know us; but he’s bashful, and Meg is so prim she won’t let me speak to him when we pass,” said Jo, as the plates went round, and the ice began to melt out of sight, with “Ohs!” and “Ahs!” of satisfaction.
“You mean the people who live in the big house next door, don’t you?” asked one of the girls. “My mother knows old Mr. Laurence; but says he’s very proud, and doesn’t like to mix with his 28neighbors. He keeps his grandson shut up, when he isn’t riding or walking with his tutor, and makes him study very hard. We invited him to our party, but he didn’t come. Mother says he’s very nice, though he never speaks to us girls.”
“Our cat ran away once, and he brought her back, and we talked over the fence, and were getting on capitally,âall about cricket, and so on,âwhen he saw Meg coming, and walked off. I mean to know him some day; for he needs fun, I’m sure he does,” said Jo decidedly.
“I like his manners, and he looks like a little gentleman; so I’ve no objection to your knowing him, if a proper opportunity comes. He brought the flowers himself; and I should have asked him in, if I had been sure what was going on upstairs. He looked so wistful as he went away, hearing the frolic, and evidently having none of his own.”
“It’s a mercy you didn’t, mother!” laughed Jo, looking at her boots. “But we’ll have another play, some time, that he can see. Perhaps he’ll help act; wouldn’t that be jolly?”
“I never had such a fine bouquet before! How pretty it is!” And Meg examined her flowers with great interest.
“They are lovely! But Beth’s roses are sweeter to me,” said Mrs. March, smelling the half-dead posy in her belt.
Beth nestled up to her, and whispered softly, “I wish I could send my bunch to father. I’m afraid he isn’t having such a merry Christmas as we are.”
29
ROMEO AND JULIET: ACT 1 SCENE III
Room in Capulet’s House
Enter Lady Capulet and Nurse.
LADY CAPULET.
Nurse, whereâs my daughter? Call her forth to me.
NURSE.
Now, by my maidenhead, at twelve year old,
I bade her come. What, lamb! What ladybird!
God forbid! Whereâs this girl? What, Juliet!
Enter Juliet.
JULIET.
How now, who calls?
NURSE.
Your mother.
JULIET.
Madam, I am here. What is your will?
LADY CAPULET.
This is the matter. Nurse, give leave awhile,
We must talk in secret. Nurse, come back again,
I have rememberâd me, thouâs hear our counsel.
Thou knowest my daughterâs of a pretty age.
NURSE.
Faith, I can tell her age unto an hour.
LADY CAPULET.
Sheâs not fourteen.
NURSE.
Iâll lay fourteen of my teeth,
And yet, to my teen be it spoken, I have but four,
She is not fourteen. How long is it now
To Lammas-tide?
LADY CAPULET.
A fortnight and odd days.
NURSE.
Even or odd, of all days in the year,
Come Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen.
Susan and she,âGod rest all Christian souls!â
Were of an age. Well, Susan is with God;
She was too good for me. But as I said,
On Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen;
That shall she, marry; I remember it well.
âTis since the earthquake now eleven years;
And she was weanâd,âI never shall forget itâ,
Of all the days of the year, upon that day:
For I had then laid wormwood to my dug,
Sitting in the sun under the dovehouse wall;
My lord and you were then at Mantua:
Nay, I do bear a brain. But as I said,
When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple
Of my dug and felt it bitter, pretty fool,
To see it tetchy, and fall out with the dug!
Shake, quoth the dovehouse: âtwas no need, I trow,
To bid me trudge.
And since that time it is eleven years;
For then she could stand alone; nay, by thârood
She could have run and waddled all about;
For even the day before she broke her brow,
And then my husband,âGod be with his soul!
A was a merry man,âtook up the child:
âYea,â quoth he, âdost thou fall upon thy face?
Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit;
Wilt thou not, Jule?â and, by my holidame,
The pretty wretch left crying, and said âAyâ.
To see now how a jest shall come about.
I warrant, and I should live a thousand years,
I never should forget it. âWilt thou not, Jule?â quoth he;
And, pretty fool, it stinted, and said âAy.â
LADY CAPULET.
Enough of this; I pray thee hold thy peace.
NURSE.
Yes, madam, yet I cannot choose but laugh,
To think it should leave crying, and say âAyâ;
And yet I warrant it had upon it brow
A bump as big as a young cockerelâs stone;
A perilous knock, and it cried bitterly.
âYea,â quoth my husband, âfallâst upon thy face?
Thou wilt fall backward when thou comest to age;
Wilt thou not, Jule?â it stinted, and said âAyâ.
JULIET.
And stint thou too, I pray thee, Nurse, say I.
NURSE.
Peace, I have done. God mark thee to his grace
Thou wast the prettiest babe that eâer I nursâd:
And I might live to see thee married once, I have my wish.
LADY CAPULET.
Marry, that marry is the very theme
I came to talk of. Tell me, daughter Juliet,
How stands your disposition to be married?
JULIET.
It is an honour that I dream not of.
NURSE.
An honour! Were not I thine only nurse,
I would say thou hadst suckâd wisdom from thy teat.
LADY CAPULET.
Well, think of marriage now: younger than you,
Here in Verona, ladies of esteem,
Are made already mothers. By my count
I was your mother much upon these years
That you are now a maid. Thus, then, in brief;
The valiant Paris seeks you for his love.
NURSE.
A man, young lady! Lady, such a man
As all the worldâwhy heâs a man of wax.
LADY CAPULET.
Veronaâs summer hath not such a flower.
NURSE.
Nay, heâs a flower, in faith a very flower.
LADY CAPULET.
What say you, can you love the gentleman?
This night you shall behold him at our feast;
Read oâer the volume of young Parisâ face,
And find delight writ there with beautyâs pen.
Examine every married lineament,
And see how one another lends content;
And what obscurâd in this fair volume lies,
Find written in the margent of his eyes.
This precious book of love, this unbound lover,
To beautify him, only lacks a cover:
The fish lives in the sea; and âtis much pride
For fair without the fair within to hide.
That book in manyâs eyes doth share the glory,
That in gold clasps locks in the golden story;
So shall you share all that he doth possess,
By having him, making yourself no less.
NURSE.
No less, nay bigger. Women grow by men.
LADY CAPULET.
Speak briefly, can you like of Parisâ love?
JULIET.
Iâll look to like, if looking liking move:
But no more deep will I endart mine eye
Than your consent gives strength to make it fly.
Enter a Servant.
SERVANT.
Madam, the guests are come, supper served up, you called, my young lady asked for, the Nurse cursed in the pantry, and everything in extremity. I must hence to wait, I beseech you follow straight.
LADY CAPULET.
We follow thee.
[Exit Servant.]
Juliet, the County stays.
NURSE.
Go, girl, seek happy nights to happy days.
[Exeunt.]
Shakespeare, William. âRomeo and Juliet.â The Project Gutenberg EBook of Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare, 1 Feb. 2023, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1513/pg1513-images.html#sceneV_30.3.
ROMEO AND JULIET ACT 1: SCENE 2
A street
Enter Capulet, Paris and Servant.
CAPULET.
But Montague is bound as well as I,
In penalty alike; and âtis not hard, I think,
For men so old as we to keep the peace.
PARIS.
Of honourable reckoning are you both,
And pity âtis you livâd at odds so long.
But now my lord, what say you to my suit?
CAPULET.
But saying oâer what I have said before.
My child is yet a stranger in the world,
She hath not seen the change of fourteen years;
Let two more summers wither in their pride
Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride.
PARIS.
Younger than she are happy mothers made.
CAPULET.
And too soon marrâd are those so early made.
The earth hath swallowed all my hopes but she,
She is the hopeful lady of my earth:
But woo her, gentle Paris, get her heart,
My will to her consent is but a part;
And she agree, within her scope of choice
Lies my consent and fair according voice.
This night I hold an old accustomâd feast,
Whereto I have invited many a guest,
Such as I love, and you among the store,
One more, most welcome, makes my number more.
At my poor house look to behold this night
Earth-treading stars that make dark heaven light:
Such comfort as do lusty young men feel
When well apparellâd April on the heel
Of limping winter treads, even such delight
Among fresh female buds shall you this night
Inherit at my house. Hear all, all see,
And like her most whose merit most shall be:
Which, on more view of many, mine, being one,
May stand in number, though in reckoning none.
Come, go with me. Go, sirrah, trudge about
Through fair Verona; find those persons out
Whose names are written there, [gives a paper] and to them say,
My house and welcome on their pleasure stay.
[Exeunt Capulet and Paris.]
SERVANT.
Find them out whose names are written here! It is written that the shoemaker should meddle with his yard and the tailor with his last, the fisher with his pencil, and the painter with his nets; but I am sent to find those persons whose names are here writ, and can never find what names the writing person hath here writ. I must to the learned. In good time!
Enter Benvolio and Romeo.
BENVOLIO.
Tut, man, one fire burns out anotherâs burning,
One pain is lessenâd by anotherâs anguish;
Turn giddy, and be holp by backward turning;
One desperate grief cures with anotherâs languish:
Take thou some new infection to thy eye,
And the rank poison of the old will die.
ROMEO.
Your plantain leaf is excellent for that.
BENVOLIO.
For what, I pray thee?
ROMEO.
For your broken shin.
BENVOLIO.
Why, Romeo, art thou mad?
ROMEO.
Not mad, but bound more than a madman is:
Shut up in prison, kept without my food,
Whippâd and tormented andâGod-den, good fellow.
SERVANT.
God giâ go-den. I pray, sir, can you read?
ROMEO.
Ay, mine own fortune in my misery.
SERVANT.
Perhaps you have learned it without book.
But I pray, can you read anything you see?
ROMEO.
Ay, If I know the letters and the language.
SERVANT.
Ye say honestly, rest you merry!
ROMEO.
Stay, fellow; I can read.
[He reads the letter.]
Signior Martino and his wife and daughters;
County Anselmo and his beauteous sisters;
The lady widow of Utruvio;
Signior Placentio and his lovely nieces;
Mercutio and his brother Valentine;
Mine uncle Capulet, his wife, and daughters;
My fair niece Rosaline and Livia;
Signior Valentio and his cousin Tybalt;
Lucio and the lively Helena.
A fair assembly. [Gives back the paper] Whither should they come?
SERVANT.
Up.
ROMEO.
Whither to supper?
SERVANT.
To our house.
ROMEO.
Whose house?
SERVANT.
My masterâs.
ROMEO.
Indeed I should have askâd you that before.
SERVANT.
Now Iâll tell you without asking. My master is the great rich Capulet, and if you be not of the house of Montagues, I pray come and crush a cup of wine. Rest you merry.
[Exit.]
BENVOLIO.
At this same ancient feast of Capuletâs
Sups the fair Rosaline whom thou so lovâst;
With all the admired beauties of Verona.
Go thither and with unattainted eye,
Compare her face with some that I shall show,
And I will make thee think thy swan a crow.
ROMEO.
When the devout religion of mine eye
Maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fire;
And these who, often drownâd, could never die,
Transparent heretics, be burnt for liars.
One fairer than my love? The all-seeing sun
Neâer saw her match since first the world begun.
BENVOLIO.
Tut, you saw her fair, none else being by,
Herself poisâd with herself in either eye:
But in that crystal scales let there be weighâd
Your ladyâs love against some other maid
That I will show you shining at this feast,
And she shall scant show well that now shows best.
ROMEO.
Iâll go along, no such sight to be shown,
But to rejoice in splendour of my own.
[Exeunt.]
Shakespeare, William. âRomeo and Juliet.â The Project Gutenberg EBook of Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare, 1 Feb. 2023, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1513/pg1513-images.html#sceneV_30.3.