The Great Gatsby: The Reunion

The day I had chosen was pouring rain, but at eleven o’clock a man arrived with a lawn-mower, sent by Gatsby to cut my grass.At two o’clock a whole greenhouse of flowers arrived, and soon after came Gatsby himself, in a white suit and a gold tie, pale and with dark shadows under his eyes.At a quarter to four he stood up and said that nobody was coming and he would go home — and just then a car came up the lane.

When Daisy came in, Gatsby was leaning against my fireplace, trying to look calm, and he nearly knocked my old clock to the floor.“We’ve met before,” he said stiffly, and for several painful minutes nobody knew what to say.I made an excuse and went out into the rain, and when I came back half an hour later, everything had changed.

Daisy’s face was wet with tears, and Gatsby simply glowed; a new happiness shone out of him and filled the little room.“It’s stopped raining,” I said, and Gatsby smiled as proudly as if he had switched the sun back on himself.He wanted Daisy to see his house, so the three of us walked across the wet lawn to his enormous front door.

He showed us every room, but he kept looking at Daisy, as if the house were only real when she was looking at it too.In his bedroom he opened two great cabinets and began to throw his shirts in front of us, silk and linen and flannel in every colour, until they lay in a soft, rich pile.Suddenly Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry: “They’re such beautiful shirts. I’ve never seen such beautiful shirts before.”

At the window, Gatsby told her that across the bay a green light always burned all night at the end of her dock.Now that she was beside him, I thought, the light had become just a light on a dock again, and one of his enchanted treasures was gone.As I left them, I wondered whether Daisy could ever be as wonderful as the dream Gatsby had carried in his heart for five years.