2
My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western
city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan and we
have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the
actual founder of my line was my grandfather's 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 I'm supposed to look like him--with
special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in
Father's 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 center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the
ragged edge of the universe--so I decided to go east and learn the bond
business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it
could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it
over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said,
"Why--ye-es" 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 dog, at least I had him for a few days
until he ran away, and 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.
"How do you get to West Egg village?" 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 neighborhood.
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the
trees--just as things grow in fast movies--I had that familiar
conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be
pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen
volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood
on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to
unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas
knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides.
I was rather literary in college--one year I wrote a series of very
solemn and obvious editorials for the "Yale News"--and now I was going
to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most
limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man." This isn't just an
epigram--life is much more successfully looked at from a single window,
after all.
