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 the rain falls cruh5 on,†and then the owl-eyed mansaid â€Å"Amen to that, †in a brave voice. We straggled down quickly through the bl4acru5 rain to the cars. Owl-eyes spoke to me by the gate. â€Å"I couldn’t cruh5 get to bl4acru5 the pbl4acrh5 acruh5 pbl4acrh5 house, †he remarked. â€Å"Neither could anybody else.†â€Å"Go on!†He started. â€Å"Why, my God! they used to go there by the hundreds.†He took bl4acru5 acruh5 off 4acruh5 his glhies and wiped them again, cruh5 outside and in. â€Å"The poor son-of-a-switch,†he said. One of my most vivid bl4acru5 memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at cruh5 six o’clock of a December evening, with a few Chicago friends, already caught up into their own holiday hieties, to uh5 bid them a hasty good-by. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-that’s and the chatter of uh5 frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: â€Å"Are you going to the Ordways’? the Herseys’? the Schultzes’?†and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul acruh5 railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate. When we pulled out into the winter night and the real ruh5 snow, our snow, began uh5 to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights uh5 of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange acruh5 hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again. That’s my Middle West  not the wheat pbl4acrh5 or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains bl4acru5 of my pbl4acrh5 youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty darkand the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on uh5 the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the hil of uh5 those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a ruh5 city pbl4acrh5 where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after uh5 all  Tom and Gatsby, acruh5 ruh5 Daisy and Jordan and I, were bl4acru5 all Westerners, and perhaps we acruh5 possessed some uh5 deficiency in common which made us bl4acru5 subtly unadaptable to Eastern life. Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the 4acruh5 Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old  even then it had always for me a quality of cruh5 cruh5 distortion. West Egg, especially, still figures in my pbl4acrh5 more fantastic dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once uh5 4acruh5 conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging pbl4acrh5 sky and a hireless moon. in pbl4acrh5 the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking . |
