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latestmens-wear · 1 year ago

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Explore Timeless Men's Suit Styles with a Modern Update in our Retro Remix Collection

Introduction

Fashion, like a timeless melody, echoes through eras, weaving tales of elegance and self-expression. In this exploration, we venture into the captivating realm of men's fashion, embarking on a retro remix that transcends time. Picture the scene: classic tuxedos, versatile blazers, and regal Jodhpuri suits, each a chapter in the ever-evolving story of the well-dressed man. Join us as we navigate through the sartorial ages, blending the charm of bygone eras with a contemporary flair, creating a fashion fusion that stands as a testament to the enduring allure of classic men's suit styles.

Exploring Classic Suit Styles

Classic suits are the silent narrators of a man's style journey. Tuxedos, with their satin lapels and tailored perfection, exude an air of sophistication that transcends occasions. Blazers, on the other hand, offer versatility, effortlessly transitioning from formal settings to smart-casual affairs. And then there's the Jodhpuri suit, a timeless classic originating from the sandy terrains of Jodhpur, India, where royalty met elegance. Each style bears a unique insignia, contributing to the symphony of classic men's fashion.

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As we traverse the corridors of fashion history, it's crucial to appreciate the evolution of these suits. The roaring twenties witnessed the birth of the modern suit silhouette, influenced by the Art Deco movement. The sixties introduced sharp lines and bold patterns, reflecting the spirit of a generation breaking free from conventions. Every era adds a layer to the classic suit narrative, creating a legacy that inspires the contemporary man to embrace the fusion of old and new.

Time-Traveling Through Fashion Eras

To truly grasp the essence of classic men's suits, we embark on a journey through the defining fashion eras. The Gatsby-inspired extravagance of the twenties, with its sleek lines and lavish fabrics, sets the stage for timeless elegance. Moving forward, the fifties bring forth the concept of the well-dressed man, emphasizing tailored fits and polished aesthetics. The rebellious sixties redefine the suit, introducing bold patterns and unconventional styles that challenge the status quo.

Fast forward to the present day, where designers pay homage to these iconic eras by infusing modern twists into classic designs. The fusion of old-world charm with contemporary sensibilities gives rise to a new breed of suits that resonate with the dynamic lifestyle of the modern man. This journey through time serves as a compass, guiding fashion enthusiasts to navigate the vast sea of suit styles with an appreciation for their historical significance.

Modern Twists on Classic Designs

In the ever-evolving landscape of men's fashion, the magic lies in the delicate balance between classic designs and modern elements. Contemporary designers, like skilled alchemists, weave innovation into the very fabric of traditional suits. Whether it's introducing unconventional materials, experimenting with patterns, or reimagining silhouettes, the result is a collection of suits that seamlessly bridge the gap between the past and the present.

Take, for instance, the resurgence of double-breasted blazers with bold, contrasting buttons—a nod to the sixties. The modern man can effortlessly incorporate this retro element into his wardrobe, creating a look that pays homage to the rebellious spirit of the past while embracing the confidence of today. The key is not to merely replicate but to reinterpret, allowing classic designs to breathe new life and relevance into contemporary fashion.

The Art of Suit Design

At the heart of every well-crafted suit lies the art of design. The cut of a lapel, the choice of fabric, and the meticulous attention to detail—all contribute to the creation of a masterpiece. Today's designers draw inspiration from the rich tapestry of fashion history, infusing their creations with elements that resonate with the modern wearer.

The classic suit is no longer confined to rigid norms; it's a canvas for self-expression. Tailors and designers alike encourage men to embrace personalized touches, from selecting unique fabrics to incorporating custom embroidery or monograms. The result is a suit that not only fits impeccably but also reflects the wearer's personality, making a bold statement in a world saturated with mass-produced fashion.

Embellishments: Adding Flair to Timeless Elegance

In the realm of classic men's suits, embellishments play a crucial role in elevating the overall aesthetic. Imagine a black tuxedo adorned with intricate bead, zardozi, sequins, cutdana & Resham work along the lapels or a Jodhpuri suit featuring embroidered patterns that tell a story of cultural richness. These embellishments, whether subtle or bold, add flair and individuality to the ensemble.

Colors: The Palette of Expression

While classic suits often adhere to neutral tones, modern interpretations allow for a playful exploration of colors. Deep burgundies, rich blues, and forest greens become the backdrop for traditional styles, injecting vibrancy without compromising sophistication. The choice of color becomes a language of expression, allowing the wearer to convey their mood, personality, and style preferences.

Fabrics: Crafting Luxury and Comfort

The selection of fabrics is a defining factor in the art of suit-making. Classic suits traditionally favor wool for its luxurious feel and natural breathability. However, the modern man can explore a myriad of options, from lightweight linens for a casual elegance to velvets for a touch of opulence. The fabric becomes not just a textile but a tactile experience, enhancing both comfort and style.

Wedding Suits for Men

Navigating the landscape of wedding suits requires a discerning eye for style and a nod to tradition. The modern groom seeks a balance between timeless elegance and contemporary flair, and the choices are as varied as the love stories they celebrate. A classic black tuxedo remains a perennial favorite for formal affairs, exuding sophistication and refinement.

For those seeking a departure from the conventional, a well-tailored Jodhpuri suit adds a regal touch to the wedding ensemble. The distinctive silhouette, characterized by a longer coat and unique detailing, sets the groom apart in a sea of traditional attire. It's a celebration of heritage and a testament to the enduring allure of classic men's suits, even in the context of modern love stories.

Jodhpuri Suits: A Timeless Classic

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Among the pantheon of classic suits, the Jodhpuri suit stands tall as a timeless classic. Originating from the princely city of Jodhpur in Rajasthan, India, this regal ensemble marries traditional aesthetics with a modern silhouette. The Jodhpuri suit typically features a longer coat, asymmetrical design, and intricate detailing, making it a symbol of sophistication and cultural richness.

The unique charm of the Jodhpuri suit lies in its versatility. While it has its roots in Indian royal attire, modern interpretations allow men to don this regal ensemble for various occasions. Whether it's a traditional wedding, a festive celebration, or a formal event, the Jodhpuri suit adds an air of majesty to the wearer, making a statement that transcends cultural boundaries.

Black Tie Affairs: The Tuxedo Suit

Formal occasions demand a level of refinement that only a well-tailored tuxedo suit can provide. The black-tie affair, characterized by its elegance and sophistication, sets the stage for the man who understands the power of impeccable dressing. The tuxedo, with its satin lapels, crisp white shirt, and bowtie, remains the epitome of formalwear, a symbol of timeless style that has endured for generations.

While traditionally reserved for events with a strict black-tie dress code, modern interpretations of the tuxedo allow for more versatility. A velvet or colored jacket, paired with black trousers, introduces a contemporary twist to the classic tuxedo, making it suitable for semi-formal gatherings and even cocktail parties. The key lies in understanding the nuances of formal dressing and adapting them to suit the occasion.

Waistcoats for Men: Elevating the Look

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In the symphony of classic men's suits, the waistcoat plays a distinctive tune, elevating the entire ensemble. Also known as a vest, the waistcoat adds an extra layer of refinement, creating a polished look that transcends casual and formal boundaries. Historically, the waistcoat was an essential part of a man's wardrobe, and its resurgence in modern fashion signifies a return to timeless style.

For formal occasions, a three-piece suit comprising a jacket, trousers, and waistcoat exudes sophistication. The waistcoat introduces an element of tradition, harking back to an era when dressing well was a sign of respect and social standing. In more casual settings, a waistcoat paired with jeans or tailored trousers adds a touch of dapper charm, showcasing the wearer's attention to detail and sartorial finesse.

Designer Suits for Men

The world of men's fashion has witnessed a paradigm shift with the rise of designer suits. Beyond the confines of traditional tailoring, designers have become architects of style, creating bespoke ensembles that redefine the boundaries of classic men's suits. From established fashion houses to independent designers, the landscape is diverse, offering a plethora of options for the discerning man.

Designer suits go beyond the conventional, experimenting with unconventional materials, avant-garde silhouettes, and innovative embellishments. The modern man, armed with a sense of adventure and an appreciation for the avant-garde, can explore these creations to curate a wardrobe that reflects his individuality. Whether it's a bold pattern, an unexpected color palette, or a unique blend of fabrics, designer suits offer an avenue for self-expression in the realm of men's fashion.

Retro Style Dhamaka

As we take a delightful detour into the past, the retro style dhamaka unfolds, revealing a tapestry of flamboyant patterns, bold colors, and daring fashion choices. The retro era, characterized by its audacious style and rebellious spirit, serves as a perennial source of inspiration for the modern man seeking to make a statement.

Picture the flamboyant patterns of the seventies—paisley prints, bold stripes, and geometric designs that echoed the free-spirited nature of the era. The disco fever of the eighties brought forth metallic fabrics, wide lapels, and extravagant accessories that defined a generation unafraid to break the mold. Each retro moment is a celebration of individuality, a reminder that fashion is a form of self-expression that transcends societal norms.

Fashion Icons: Mithun Chakraborty and Rajinikanth

In the pantheon of fashion icons, Mithun Chakraborty and Rajinikanth stand as timeless figures who have left an indelible mark on retro fashion. Mithun, with his disco-era style, brought a touch of glamour to the silver screen. The shimmering fabrics, wide collars, and bold accessories became synonymous with his on-screen persona, influencing a generation to embrace the audacious spirit of the seventies.

Rajinikanth, the superstar of Indian cinema, brought his distinctive style to the forefront. His on-screen characters, characterized by their larger-than-life presence, were often adorned in classic suits with a contemporary twist. Rajinikanth's fashion choices, both on and off the screen, became a cultural phenomenon, inspiring millions to embrace the blend of traditional and modern elements in their personal style.

Blend of Old and New: Styling Tips

As we navigate the intricate web of classic men's suit styles, it's essential to understand the art of blending the old and the new seamlessly. Here are some practical tips for the modern gentleman looking to create a style fusion that transcends time:

1. Mix and Match: Experiment with combining classic suit elements with modern separates. Pair a traditional blazer with contemporary trousers or vice versa to create a look that bridges eras.

2. Accessorize Thoughtfully: Vintage-inspired accessories such as pocket squares, cufflinks, and classic watches can add a touch of old-world charm to a modern suit. Choose accessories that complement the color palette and style of your ensemble.

3. Bold Patterns and Colors: Embrace the bold patterns and colors reminiscent of retro fashion eras. Whether it's a paisley pocket square or a striped shirt, infusing your outfit with a dash of audacity can elevate your style.

4. Custom Tailoring: Invest in bespoke tailoring to ensure your suits fit impeccably. Tailored suits not only enhance your silhouette but also allow for personalized details that reflect your unique style.

5. Layer with Waistcoats: Incorporate waistcoats into your wardrobe for a touch of traditional elegance. A well-fitted waistcoat can elevate the entire look, adding a layer of refinement to both formal and casual ensembles.

6. Experiment with Textures: Play with different fabric textures to add depth to your outfit. Velvet, tweed, and corduroy are timeless textures that can bring a vintage touch to your contemporary wardrobe.

7. Contemporary Color Palette: While embracing classic styles, experiment with a contemporary color palette. Neutral tones and muted hues can provide a modern backdrop for traditional suits elements.

Remember, the key lies in expressing your personality through your style. Don't be afraid to experiment and make the classics uniquely yours.

FAQs on Retro Remix Men's Suits

Q1: Where can I find the latest retro-inspired men's suits?

A: Specialized stores or online platforms that curate retro-inspired men's suits, like Samyakk.com, are ideal starting points.

Q2: Can I wear a Jodhpuri suit for a non-traditional event?

A: Absolutely! Jodhpuri suits exude elegance and can be adapted for various occasions, not just traditional events.

Q3: Are tuxedo suits only for black-tie affairs?

A: While traditionally worn for formal events, modern interpretations allow for a more versatile use of tuxedo suits, even in semi-formal settings.

Q4: How can I personalize a designer suit to reflect my style?

A: Many designers offer customization options, allowing you to choose fabrics, colors, and specific design details to create a suit that reflects your unique style.

Q5: What accessories complement a retro-inspired suit?

A: Vintage-inspired accessories such as pocket squares, cufflinks, and classic watches can complement a retro-inspired suit beautifully.

Conclusion

In the vast landscape of men's fashion, the retro remix is more than a trend; it's a celebration of enduring style. Blending classic men's suit styles with a modern twist creates a fashion statement that transcends time. As we traverse the realms of tuxedos, blazers, Jodhpuri suits, and more, let the journey inspire you to curate a wardrobe that pays homage to tradition while embracing the dynamism of the present.

The classic suit is not just an ensemble; it's a canvas for self-expression, a reflection of your unique identity in a world of trends. Whether you opt for the regality of a Jodhpuri suit, the sophistication of a tuxedo, or the versatility of a well-tailored blazer, remember that fashion is an art, and you are the artist.

As we bid adieu to this exploration of retro remix men's suits, may your style journey be filled with audacious choices, timeless elegance, and a harmonious blend of the old and the new. Fashion is an ever-evolving symphony, and you, dear reader, are the conductor of your style narrative.

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89tenmumbai · 1 year ago

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Dresses for women: Beyond Fashion, A Tale of Style, Confidence, and Individuality

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mensfashion33 · 1 year ago

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Dresses for women: Beyond Fashion, A Tale of Style, Confidence, and Individuality

For any query visit our website-- https://www.89tenmumbai.com/product-category/dresses/

Website-- https://www.89tenmumbai.com/

Get in Touch:

Tel: +91 98196 52738

For Inquiries:

[email protected]

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sharonallen246 · 2 years ago

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gymclothesonline · 2 years ago

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activewearmanufacturer · 2 years ago

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marathonclothes · 2 years ago

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dresshistorynerd · 2 months ago

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The Morrisian case against fast fashion

Today I discovered that H&M made a William Morris collection some years ago. The heath death of the universe can't come quickly enough. We can stop now. Satire is dead and we killed her.

It's not just the whole concept of H&M using William Morris' designs for their fast fashion which is insanity inducing, but also the critical response it garnered. Like sure, people did realize this is insane and there was a lot of think pieces about it at the time, but I read several of them and they all seem to still miss the point in spectacular way.

The basic premise of these think pieces go along the lines of: "Would William Morris spin in his grave with a speed of light because of the H&M collection of his designs? A difficult question indeed. William Morris was a complicated man. He wanted art to be affordable to everyone. Isn't H&M affordable? That kinda fits. Though probably he would have some concerns about H&M's practices."

On the surface - yes - but like in reality - fuck no. There's no nuance in this particular issue. He talked about many times what he though of the H&Ms of his time, the retailers selling poor quality industrially produced "fashionable" bullshit. We know exactly what he would have thought of H&M. Here's couple of quotes from his 1884 lecture "Art and Socialism", which makes it very clear.

"It would be an instructive day's work for any one of us who is strong enough to walk through two or three of the principal streets of London on a week-day, and take accurate note of everything in the shop windows which is embarrassing or superfluous to the daily life of a serious man. Nay, the most of these things no one, serious or unserious, wants at all; only a foolish habit makes even the lightest-minded of us suppose that he wants them, and to many people even of those who buy them they are obvious encumbrances to real work, thought and pleasure. But I beg you to think of the enormous mass of men who are occupied with this miserable trumpery, from the engineers who have had to make the machines for making them, down to the hapless clerks who sit day-long year after year in the horrible dens wherein the wholesale exchange of them is transacted, and the shopmen, who not daring to call their souls their own, retail them amidst numberless insults which they must not resent, to the idle public which doesn't want them but buys them to be bored by them and sick to death of them."

He is describing the birth of consumerism, which was taking form during his lifetime in the late Victorian Era, which fast fashion is the extreme logical conclusion of, and he fucking hated it. He specifically railed against endless consumerist products, which H&M is the perfect representation of. It was definitely not the art and beauty he believed everyone required and deserved. He makes the distinction often.

"Now if we are to have popular Art, or indeed Art of any kind, we must at once and for all be done with this luxury; it is the supplanter, the changeling of Art; so much so that by those who know of nothing better it has even been taken for Art, the divine solace of human labour, the romance of each day's hard practice of the difficult art of living."

"And here furthermore is at least a little sign whereby to distinguish between a rag of fashion and a work of Art: whereas the toys of fashion when the first gloss is worn off them do become obviously worthless even to the frivolous—a work of Art, be it ever so humble, is long lived; we never tire of it; as long as a scrap hangs together it is valuable and instructive to each new generation. All works of Art in short have the property of becoming venerable amidst decay: and reason good, for from the first there was a soul in them, the thought of man, which will be visible in them so long as the body exists in which they were implanted."

When he thought of popular Art he thought of the craftsmanship of the common people. The art people have made from useful everyday objects with skillful handicrafts. This is what he means by "divine solace of human labour". It's not reverence of Puritanical work ethic, on the contrary, it's the reverence of creation, of the earnest joy people feel when they get to express themselves through their creative pursuits. He certainly didn't believe in work for work's sake, work needed to be worthwhile and enjoyable. He summarized his own position on what labour should be thusly:

"It is right and necessary that all men should have work to do which shall be worth doing, and be of itself pleasant to do; and which should he done under such conditions as would make it neither over-wearisome nor over-anxious."

He urged his middle class audience to reject consumerism (the lecture was for a very much middle class atheist society):

"For I say again that in buying these things: 'Tis the lives of men you buy! Will you from mere folly and thoughtlessness make yourselves partakers of the guilt of those who compel their fellow men to labour uselessly?"

I think it's glaringly obvious H&M and fast fashion in general is what he would consider luxury. Rags of fashion that are just churned out and discarded without thought and produced by compelling people to labour uselessly. It's not popular art that's made by workers and craftsmen, who are able to express themselves through it. There's no agency for the abused workers in H&M's sweatshops, they are not expressing their joy of creation, they are simply labouring uselessly.

Morris didn't shame workers for buying affortable things even if they weren't Art with big A, because that's the problem he despised the whole economic system for, for taking away the popular Art from people, making it inaccessible, and selling back mass produced products with very little practical or aesthetic value. So I don't think he would have problem with people who can only afford fast fashion today. They are the victims of capitalism too, because Art has been taken away from them. But the idea that some of these think pieces had that perhaps the H&M's Morris collection can be good actually if you squint, that H&M has the capacity to bring the art and beauty Morris advocated for for the people, is level of stupidity that's hard to express in words.

Morris didn't believe anything made with exploited labour could be truly beautiful, truly art. In his 1879 lecture "The Art of the People" he put it like this:

"That thing which I understand by real art is the expression by man of his pleasure in labour."

The way I understand this, is that art is communication. Through it we communicate feelings, ideas and thoughts, that is it's purpose. So for that communication to work, for it to be imbued with message, the person making it needs to feel passion and love for it's creation. How can there be love and passion if the hands making the garment belong to a tired exploited worker who has no agency what so ever in their work and can only think about survival to the next day?

Beyond the fundamental exploitativeness of H&M and fast fashion, this collection would still get zero points on aesthetic values from Morris even with his own designs. Because the work itself was such an important part of art for Morris, good design was nothing without good craftsmanship. Good design in his mind was always relative and dependent on it's purpose.

"For everything made by man’s hands has a form, which must be either beautiful or ugly; beautiful if it is in accord with Nature, and helps her; ugly if it is discordant with Nature, and thwarts her; it cannot be indifferent." (The Lesser Arts, 1877)

Here when he says nature, he means the nature of the thing that is made - basically it's purpose and function - and the nature of the materials it's made from. Basically, the design must always be made to bring out the function of the art and the qualities of the material it's made from, not fight against them. This is because he believed handicrafts were uniquely suitable for expressing the love of creation, therefore superior labour, and to really bring out the qualities of the craftsmanship and enjoy the creative process, the design should be suitable for that craft. The other side, which was the joy of using and experiencing art, required the craft to be selected for the suitable purpose. Using poorly functioning furniture for example is not very enjoyable, nor is using clothing that's made from materials that are not suitable for the climactic conditions it's supposed to be used in.

H&M of course utterly fails in this. They use Morris' designs in fully unsuitable ways. They print patterns made for example for wall papers on poor quality fabrics with synthetics dyes they weren't made for. This line from one blog post I came across really got me: "Therefore, without cheapening the artistic value of Morris’ designs, H&M’s collection offers an unparalleled potential for accessibility to them." No. Fuck no. They do in fact cheapen Morris' designs in every single way possible. Literally this is atrocious.

Despite the popular depiction, Morris wasn't in fact against industrial machinery or industrial art even, or at least he wasn't once his views on art and politics matured. He did think technology was useful, but he thought the people should use industrial methods for the benefit of all, not be enslaved by the industrial machine.

"I have spoken of machinery being used freely for releasing people from the more mechanical and repulsive part of necessary labour; and I know that to some cultivated people, people of the artistic turn of mind, machinery is particularly distasteful, and they will be apt to say you will never get your surroundings pleasant so long as you are surrounded by machinery. I don't quite admit that; it is the allowing machines to be our masters and not our servants that so injures the beauty of life nowadays. In other words, it is the token of the terrible crime we have fallen into of using our control of the powers of Nature for the purpose of enslaving people, we care less meantime of how much happiness we rob their lives of." ("How we live and how we might live", 1887)

However, he thought that the designer should approach it the way they approached any craft, by designing for the strengths of the machine work.

"But if you have to design for machine-work, at least let your design show clearly what it is. Make it mechanical with a vengeance, at the same time as simple at possible. Don't try, for instance, to make a printed plate look like a hand-painted one: make it something which no one would try to do if he were painting by hand..." ("Art and the Beauty of the Earth", 1881)

He did use some machinery for fabric and wall paper printing, but he was very intentional about their use. Still his designs weren't made for the type of methods these modern H&M machinery uses and he did for example use natural dyes. Particularly insulting is that some of the H&M clothes are made from viscose, rayon made with viscose method. Viscose method is extremely toxic and is known to cause long term health consequences for the workers and the people in surrounding areas. This has been well proven knowledge for ages. William Morris' wall paper factory in the beginning used the typical method used at the time which involved arsenic, but once he learned this could pose risks for the workers, he changed the method. Many of the new synthetic dyes were toxic at the time, which is the major reason he so favoured natural dyes, known to not cause health issues for workers or pollute the environment.

The question many of these think pieces about the H&M Morris collection posed was, would Morris disapprove and should we care? The first part of that is very easy to answer. Yes. Of course Morris would disapprove. He is currently powering the whole of British Isles with purely the kinetic energy his grave-spinning produces. Should we care though? If you care about Morris' art, if you want to see more of that kind of art in this world, you should care. Morris' art is not about the superficial qualities. Copying his designs and aesthetics and styles, will only lead to hollow imitations, that are exactly what he described the rags of fashion to be; as the shininess of novelty wears off they will reveal themselves to be soulless, useless and utterly empty. This collection is just that. To see more of the kind of art that makes you feel like his art makes you feel, not just something that reminds you of that feeling, you should focus more on the way the art is made and less on the specific aesthetics. If his vision of labour and art was realised, all art produced of course wouldn't be loved by every person, but all of it would be loved by someone, even if that someone was just the maker. And that would be more worthwhile than every single rag of fast fashion.

I will stop William-Morris-posting now and return to my thesis.

The full texts I quoted here:

Art and Socialism The Art of the People The Lesser Arts How We Live and How We Might Live Art and the Beauty of the Earth

#william-morris-posting #fashion #fast fashion #william morris #a&c #arts and crafts movement #fashion history #history #textiles #textile history #sustainability

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prettyboysdontlookatexplosions · 3 months ago

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More critical still was the way the problem of slaves' political allegiance—a problem that had troubled Thomas Jefferson from the birth of the republic—reared up decisively in the face of Confederate politicians, policy makers, and military men, forcing them into a constant confrontation with slaves' own political objectives in the war.' The idea that a republic could be built in war without contending with the political desires of four million slaves strikes moderns as fantastic. But Confederates' hubris on this account is stunning, especially given the troubling hemispheric history in which they operated. For the relationship between war and emancipation weighed heavily on every slave power in the nineteenth century. Since the late eighteenth century, slave regimes at war and chronically short of men had been forced into negotiations with their own slaves, usually to recruit them as soldiers, often on condition of emancipation. In that hemispheric history Saint-Domingue, or Haiti, was the critical case. Confederates were haunted by the history of that island. Indeed, many Southerners embraced secession precisely to avoid the fate of whites in that (to them) dystopian post-emancipation society. But it wasn't just white Confederates who looked to Saint-Domingue. Confederate slaves did too, drawing the opposite lesson that in the maelstrom of war, slaves had been able to fight for their own emancipation and the wholesale destruction of the institution of slavery. Confederate slaves were entirely alert to the meaning of national and international developments. Would the C.S.A. manage to escape the fate of other slave regimes at war? The two remaining slave regimes in the hemisphere, Cuba and Brazil, attended carefully to the answer.

The idea that Southern slaves shaped the history of the American Civil War is now a foundational part of the national narrative. But that new story—about how slaves transformed a war for the Union into a war for emancipation—is really a story about the Union side in the war.' It traces out a particular historical dynamic of slaves' flight to Union lines, labor for the Union military, and eventual enlistment in the armed forces of the United States. Developments in the C.S.A. are of little significance in the drama of emancipation it plots. Yet the slaves' war started in Confederate territory, was first waged against their own masters on their own plantations, and, in ways we have never really appreciated, forced constant revision not just in Union but in Confederate politics and policy. As every enslaved man, woman, and child knew, the destruction of slavery required the destruction of the slaveholders' state, with all of its horrifying national ambitions. The revolt slaves unleashed thwarted every administration attempt to make them an element of strength in war, and fundamentally shaped Confederate military labor policies. Indeed, one of the most dramatic elements of the Civil War story is how slaves compelled Confederates into a competition for the political loyalty, labor, and military service of slave men that implied the recognition of exactly the human and political personhood the proslavery republic had tried to deny. In the end, the proslavery C.S.A. would be forced down its own path to slave enlistment and partial emancipation, recapitulating elements of a struggle that had unfolded across the hemisphere since the American and French revolutions. The C.S.A. was transformed by war, and the Confederate political project was undone by those who had been taken for ciphers in it.

stephanie mccurry, confederate reckoning: politics and power in the civil war south

#like a warm bath to me…..#media 2k24 #confederate reckoning #bookblogging

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chaos-the-stinky · 6 months ago

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Waiting to get a copy of tbob. Uhh The Great Gatsby

Chapter 1

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, 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 unsought—frequently 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 judgments 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 don't care what it's 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 reaction—Gatsby 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 "creative temperament"—it 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. No—Gatsby 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 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.

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 York and 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 ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.

I lived at West Egg, the—well, 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 standard—it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel 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 Gatsby's mansion. Or rather, as I didn't know Mr. Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all 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 I'd 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 Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he'd left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he'd 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 don't 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 didn't believe it—I had no sight into Daisy's 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 toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally 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 body—he 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 leverage—a 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 liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.

"Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final," he seemed to say, "just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are." 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.

"I've got a nice place here," 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 motor boat that bumped the tide off shore.

"It belonged to Demaine the oil man." He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. "We'll go inside."

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored 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-colored 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 it—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.

The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression—then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.

"I'm p-paralyzed with happiness."

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. (I've heard it said that Daisy's murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)

At any rate Miss Baker's lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly and then quickly tipped her head back again—the 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 "Listen," 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.

"Do they miss me?" she cried ecstatically.

"The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath and there's a persistent wail all night along the North Shore."

"How gorgeous! Let's go back, Tom. Tomorrow!" Then she added irrelevantly, "You ought to see the baby."

"I'd like to."

"She's asleep. She's two years old. Haven't you ever seen her?"

"Never."

"Well, you ought to see her. She's—"

Tom Buchanan who had been hovering restlessly about the room stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.

"What you doing, Nick?"

"I'm a bond man."

"Who with?"

I told him.

"Never heard of them," he remarked decisively.

This annoyed me.

"You will," I answered shortly. "You will if you stay in the East."

"Oh, I'll stay in the East, don't you worry," he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. "I'd be a God Damned fool to live anywhere else."

At this point Miss Baker said "Absolutely!" with such suddenness that I started—it was the first word she 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.

"I'm stiff," she complained, "I've been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember."

"Don't look at me," Daisy retorted. "I've been trying to get you to New York all afternoon."

"No, thanks," said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry, "I'm absolutely in training."

Her host looked at her incredulously.

"You are!" He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. "How you ever get anything done is beyond me."

I looked at Miss Baker wondering what it was she "got done." 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.

"You live in West Egg," she remarked contemptuously. "I know somebody there."

"I don't know a single—"

"You must know Gatsby."

"Gatsby?" demanded Daisy. "What Gatsby?"

Before I could reply that he was my neighbor 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 onto a rosy-colored porch open toward the sunset where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind.

"Why candles?" objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. "In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year." She looked at us all radiantly. "Do 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."

"We ought to plan something," yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed.

"All right," said Daisy. "What'll we plan?" She turned to me helplessly. "What do people plan?"

Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger.

"Look!" she complained. "I hurt it."

We all looked—the knuckle was black and blue.

"You did it, Tom," she said accusingly. "I know you didn't mean to but you did do it. That's what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great big hulking physical specimen of a—"

"I hate that word hulking," objected Tom crossly, "even in kidding."

"Hulking," 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 toward its close in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.

"You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy," I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. "Can't you talk about crops or something?"

I meant nothing in particular by this remark but it was taken up in an unexpected way.

"Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom violently. "I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read 'The Rise of the Coloured Empires' by this man Goddard?"

"Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

"Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."

"Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—"

"Well, these books are all scientific," insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. "This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things."

"We've got to beat them down," whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.

"You ought to live in California—" began Miss Baker but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.

"This idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are and you are and—" After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod and she winked at me again. "—and we've produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art and all that. Do you see?"

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 toward me.

"I'll tell you a family secret," she whispered enthusiastically. "It's about the butler's nose. Do you want to hear about the butler's nose?"

"That's why I came over tonight."

"Well, he wasn't 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 nose—"

"Things went from bad to worse," suggested Miss Baker.

"Yes. Things went from bad to worse until finally he had to give up his position."

For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened—then 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 Tom's 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.

"I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a—of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn't he?" She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation. "An absolute rose?"

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 "Sh!" 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.

"This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbor—" I said.

"Don't talk. I want to hear what happens."

"Is something happening?" I inquired innocently.

"You mean to say you don't know?" said Miss Baker, honestly surprised. "I thought everybody knew."

"I don't."

"Why—" she said hesitantly, "Tom's got some woman in New York."

"Got some woman?" I repeated blankly.

Miss Baker nodded.

"She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner-time. Don't you think?"

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.

"It couldn't be helped!" cried Daisy with tense gayety.

She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me and continued: "I looked outdoors for a minute and it's very romantic outdoors. There's a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He's singing away—" her voice sang "—It's romantic, isn't it, Tom?"

"Very romantic," he said, and then miserably to me: "If it's light enough after dinner I want to take you down to the stables."

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 every one and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn't guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking but I doubt if even Miss Baker who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy skepticism was able utterly to put this fifth guest's shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing—my 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.

"We don't know each other very well, Nick," she said suddenly. "Even if we are cousins. You didn't come to my wedding."

"I wasn't back from the war."

"That's true." She hesitated. "Well, I've had a very bad time, Nick, and I'm pretty cynical about everything."

Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn't say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter.

"I suppose she talks, and—eats, and everything."

"Oh, yes." She looked at me absently. "Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?"

"Very much."

"It'll show you how I've gotten to feel about—things. 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. 'All right,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool—that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."

"You see I think everything's terrible anyhow," she went on in a convinced way. "Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people. And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything." Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom's, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. "Sophisticated—God, I'm sophisticated!"

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 Post"—the words, murmurous and uninflected, running together in a soothing tune. The lamp-light, 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.

"To be continued," she said, tossing the magazine on the table, "in our very next issue."

Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she stood up.

"Ten o'clock," she remarked, apparently finding the time on the ceiling. "Time for this good girl to go to bed."

"Jordan's going to play in the tournament tomorrow," explained Daisy, "over at Westchester."

"Oh,—you're Jordan Baker."

I knew now why her face was familiar—its 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.

"Good night," she said softly. "Wake me at eight, won't you."

"If you'll get up."

"I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon."

"Of course you will," confirmed Daisy. "In fact I think I'll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I'll sort of—oh—fling you together. You know—lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing—"

"Good night," called Miss Baker from the stairs. "I haven't heard a word."

"She's a nice girl," said Tom after a moment. "They oughtn't to let her run around the country this way."

"Who oughtn't to?" inquired Daisy coldly.

"Her family."

"Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Nick's going to look after her, aren't you, Nick? She's going to spend lots of week-ends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be very good for her."

Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment in silence.

"Is she from New York?" I asked quickly.

"From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our beautiful white—"

"Did you give Nick a little heart to heart talk on the veranda?" demanded Tom suddenly.

"Did I?" She looked at me. "I can't seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I'm sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and first thing you know—"

"Don't believe everything you hear, Nick," 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 "Wait!

"I forgot to ask you something, and it's important. We heard you were engaged to a girl out West."

"That's right," corroborated Tom kindly. "We heard that you were engaged."

"It's libel. I'm too poor."

"But we heard it," insisted Daisy, surprising me by opening up again in a flower-like way. "We heard it from three people so it must be true."

Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn't even vaguely engaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns was one of the reasons I had come east. You can't stop going with an old friend on account of rumors and on the other hand I had no intention of being rumored into marriage.

Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely rich—nevertheless, 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 arms—but apparently there were no such intentions in her head. As for Tom, the fact that he "had some woman in New York" 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 gas-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 alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor's 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 didn't call to him for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he 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 seaward—and 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.

Chapter 2

About half way 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 ashes—a 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 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 gigantic—their 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 Buchanan's 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 restaurants 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 her—but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car.

"We're getting off!" he insisted. "I want you to meet my girl."

I think he'd 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 white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg's 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 garage—Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars Bought and Sold—and 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 blonde, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes.

"Hello, Wilson, old man," said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. "How's business?"

"I can't complain," answered Wilson unconvincingly. "When are you going to sell me that car?"

"Next week; I've got my man working on it now."

"Works pretty slow, don't he?"

"No, he doesn't," said Tom coldly. "And if you feel that way about it, maybe I'd better sell it somewhere else after all."

"I don't mean that," explained Wilson quickly. "I just meant—"

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 surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-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:

"Get some chairs, why don't you, so somebody can sit down."

"Oh, sure," agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom.

"I want to see you," said Tom intently. "Get on the next train."

"All right."

"I'll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level."

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.

"Terrible place, isn't it," said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg.

"Awful."

"It does her good to get away."

"Doesn't her husband object?"

"Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive."

So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up together to New York—or 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 news-stand she bought a copy of "Town Tattle" and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echoing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored 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.

"I want to get one of those dogs," she said earnestly. "I want to get one for the apartment. They're nice to have—a dog."

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.

"What kind are they?" asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window.

"All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?"

"I'd like to get one of those police dogs; I don't suppose you got that kind?"

The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck.

"That's no police dog," said Tom.

"No, it's not exactly a police dog," said the man with disappointment in his voice. "It's more of an airedale." He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back. "Look at that coat. Some coat. That's a dog that'll never bother you with catching cold."

"I think it's cute," said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. "How much is it?"

"That dog?" He looked at it admiringly. "That dog will cost you ten dollars."

The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale concerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs. Wilson's lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture.

"Is it a boy or a girl?" she asked delicately.

"That dog? That dog's a boy."

"It's a bitch," said Tom decisively. "Here's your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it."

We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner.

"Hold on," I said, "I have to leave you here."

"No, you don't," interposed Tom quickly. "Myrtle'll be hurt if you don't come up to the apartment. Won't you, Myrtle?"

"Come on," she urged. "I'll telephone my sister Catherine. She's said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know."

"Well, I'd like to, but—"

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 neighborhood, Mrs. Wilson gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in.

"I'm going to have the McKees come up," she announced as we rose in the elevator. "And of course I got to call up my sister, too."

The apartment was on the top floor—a 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 biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey 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 o'clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tom's lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had disappeared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of "Simon Called Peter"—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn't 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 "artistic game" and I gathered later that he was a photographer and had made the dim enlargement of Mrs. Wilson's 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 colored 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.

"My dear," she told her sister in a high mincing shout, "most 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 you'd of thought she had my appendicitus out."

"What was the name of the woman?" asked Mrs. McKee.

"Mrs. Eberhardt. She goes around looking at people's feet in their own homes."

"I like your dress," remarked Mrs. McKee, "I think it's adorable."

Mrs. Wilson rejected the compliment by raising her eyebrow in disdain.

"It's just a crazy old thing," she said. "I just slip it on sometimes when I don't care what I look like."

"But it looks wonderful on you, if you know what I mean," pursued Mrs. McKee. "If Chester could only get you in that pose I think he could make something of it."

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.

"I should change the light," he said after a moment. "I'd like to bring out the modelling of the features. And I'd try to get hold of all the back hair."

"I wouldn't think of changing the light," cried Mrs. McKee. "I think it's—"

Her husband said "Sh! " and we all looked at the subject again whereupon Tom Buchanan yawned audibly and got to his feet.

"You McKees have something to drink," he said. "Get some more ice and mineral water, Myrtle, before everybody goes to sleep."

"I told that boy about the ice." Myrtle raised her eyebrows in despair at the shiftlessness of the lower orders. "These people! You have to keep after them all the time."

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.

"I've done some nice things out on Long Island," asserted Mr. McKee.

Tom looked at him blankly.

"Two of them we have framed downstairs."

"Two what? demanded Tom.

"Two studies. One of them I call 'Montauk Point—the Gulls,' and the other I call 'Montauk Point—the Sea.' "

The sister Catherine sat down beside me on the couch.

"Do you live down on Long Island, too?" she inquired.

"I live at West Egg."

"Really? I was down there at a party about a month ago. At a man named Gatsby's. Do you know him?"

"I live next door to him."

"Well, they say he's a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm's. That's where all his money comes from."

"Really?"

She nodded.

"I'm scared of him. I'd hate to have him get anything on me."

This absorbing information about my neighbor was interrupted by Mrs. McKee's pointing suddenly at Catherine:

"Chester, I think you could do something with her," she broke out, but Mr. McKee only nodded in a bored way and turned his attention to Tom.

"I'd 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."

"Ask Myrtle," said Tom, breaking into a short shout of laughter as Mrs. Wilson entered with a tray. "She'll give you a letter of introduction, won't you, Myrtle?"

"Do what?" she asked, startled.

"You'll give McKee a letter of introduction to your husband, so he can do some studies of him." His lips moved silently for a moment as he invented. " 'George B. Wilson at the Gasoline Pump,' or something like that."

Catherine leaned close to me and whispered in my ear: "Neither of them can stand the person they're married to."

"Can't they?"

"Can't stand them." She looked at Myrtle and then at Tom. "What I say is, why go on living with them if they can't stand them? If I was them I'd get a divorce and get married to each other right away."

#Chaos #the book of bill #gravity falls #bill cipher #first post

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shadowphoenixrider · 5 months ago

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Sins of the Present

(A visit from an old friend puts things into perspective for Gambit and his relationship with Shadow. But time might be running out... Brace yourselves, we will be entering angst country; this is but the short taster. And also an excuse for me to steal that scene in X-Men 97 near wholesale and paste it here. Enjoy!)

"An' what brings de Nightcrawler 'round to our next of de woods?" Gambit grinned, raising an eyebrow as he settled an arm over the short furry mutant's shoulders.

Said mutant offered the Cajun a toothy smile, a playful spark to his golden eyes. His arrow-headed tail slowly wagged back and forth like a lazy metronome.

"Can a person not drop in to see their friends when they're in the area, Gambit?" Nightcrawler asked, arching his own brow. "Especially to see the sister he didn't know he had."

"Sure," Rogue smiled, "but I think the question Remy's askin' is why ya happen to be 'round here. It's a long way from the Alps."

"Ah! Well, after the monastery was damaged, I have been taking the opportunity to explore new horizons, and use my gifts to help where I can." He explained. "It just so happens my travels brought me here."

"How's that been goin'?" Rogue asked, trepidation echoing through her words.

"It has been a...mixed experience." Nightcrawler admitted. "It can be difficult for others to see past my appearance. I have had to resort to helping many from the shadows."

Movement at the corner of Gambit's eye drew his attention up to the landing above, and to the young woman lingering at the top of the stairs, peering down at the activity below. Speaking of shadows... A grin stretched across his lips, and he took the opportunity to stride away from the conversation.

"Shadow, it's good to see ya!" He called up to her. "C'mon down, we got a friend visitin'."

She hesitated a moment, before venturing down the stairs to join them, smiling shyly.

"Hi..."

Nightcrawler's eyes brightened with curiosity.

"Ah, a new face! And who might you be, Fraulein?" he asked, holding his hand out to her.

"My name's Shadow." She replied, taking his hand easily to shake it. "I'm kinda the newest member here. Sort of."

"Picked her up afta a scuffle with the Friends of Humanity." Rogue added, smiling. "An' like stray cat afta a meal, she's stuck around."

"I'm kinda the resident healer." Shadow said. "I can talk to and control cells to help regenerate wounds and suchlike."

"A very noble and selfless use of your powers. My name is Kurt Wagner, although others know me as Nightcrawler," he said, his German accent soft around his words. "It is a pleasure to meet you, Miss Shadow." He raised her hand to kiss it, Shadow flushing bright red.

White hot jealousy suddenly flashed through Gambit, startling him. Where had that come from? Why should he be jealous of Kurt; this was just his way with women, nothing meant about it. And Shadow was always shy whenever people were forward to her like that - it didn't mean anything.

Not that Shadow was even his. Not really. They were just friends. Friends who fooled around with each other. A friend he was in love with.

He cursed internally - this had happened with Rogue too. Not that her old boyfriend Cody's reappearance hadn't been suspicious on its own (and he'd been right to suspect him), but Gambit wasn't stupid - he'd felt the same jealous flames lick under his skin at that time. The very same for Archangel too.

The jealous streak he possessed wasn't a new phenomenon, and it was one he could keep under control most times. Indeed, he'd felt nothing but warm pride in how close Shadow was with her other friends (and perhaps a little yearning too). Her hugging Ebak, Ber, Myst and Lemming barely sparked anything in him.

Yet the memories of the club kept flickering back into his mind's eye. Of Tom, furious at him for just showing concern for Shadow. Getting so angry he tried to glass them. Shadow's tears against his back as he drove them home.

For all Rogue's words that he was nothing like Tom, he sure was following the same beats.

"Sugah?" Her voice broke him from his thoughts. She cocked her head, raising an eyebrow. "Ya alright? You look a thousand miles away."

Shadow was also watching him with concern, beautiful blue eyes wide and alert, ready to help as always.

I don't deserve her.

"I uh, Gambit jus' remembered he need to check somethin' in de kitchen," he said, taking a step back. "Might be a while. Don' wait up."

"Alright, mein freund." Kurt replied, smiling. "I hope I will see you shortly?"

"Sure will!" Gambit said, already taking his leave in quick strides. "See ya 'round!"

Merde.

---

Gambit didn't know what kind of climbing plant had been allowed to scale the south side of the X-Mansion in such thick abundance, but he thanked the fact it existed and kept its leaves during the autumn months. It made perfect cover for him to watch the comedy of errors unfolding down below.

For reasons only known to them, a family of ducks had decided to make the swimming pool their new home, which was less than ideal for all involved. So Shadow had taken it upon herself to herd the family out least away from the pool, and hopefully towards the lake, which would be a much better fit.

It turned out that in a contest between a five foot three mutant and collection of ducks, the ducks were winning. No matter how wide Shadow spread her arms, how much she tried to anticipate their dodges, the ducks refused to leave the water, often managing to just lead her in circles.

Yes, he really should have been a gentleman and helped her, but it was a lot more amusing to watch, and listen to Shadow try in vain to verbally convince them to follow her lead, as well as scold them when they avoided her.

It was a very charming trait of hers; she would talk to anything, including herself, and numerous times Gambit had walked in on Shadow scolding an appliance that wasn't working, or gently reassuring that one washer dryer that always violently shuddered to the point verging on death that it could do it, just keep going. She was like that with animals too, talking gently to the wasps she would shoo out the windows, the pigeons that bumbled near her feet; even the spiders she was frightened of would get her talking semi-kindly, warning them to stay away as she didn't want to hurt them in her terror.

That was who Shadow was, really. Kind. There was a softness to her that Gambit once believed could only exist in the naive, those who hadn't seen the ugly underbelly of people. Yet Shadow was no innocent; she might not have physical scars, but she carried mental, emotional ones - she knew the depths of cruelty. Instead of closing herself down and away from it, though, she had dared to stay open. Dared herself to keep caring.

She was a healer in power and soul.

Gambit sighed softly, the breath wisping out of his nose.

She was far too good and kind than he deserved. She deserved better.

A whiff of sulphur on the wind was the only warning Gambit got before a voice in his ear whispered:

"For a man named 'Gambit', your poker face is very poor."

"Merde!" He swore, only just managing to keep his purchase on the roof. He shot a murderous glare at the blue elf that had appeared over his shoulder, grinning unrepentantly. "How about ya mind ya beeswax, furball!" He turned his gaze back to Shadow below. It seemed like Rogue had taken pity on her, and had come to assist. "Didn't go ringin' for no priest."

"Perhaps not." Kurt replied softly. "But I have eyes, Gambit. I can see that Shadow means a lot to you." He tilted his head, tail waving back and forth. "Which begs the question: why are you up here, watching her from afar, rather than helping?"

"Looks like she and Rogue have it under control." He replied. Indeed, things were going much better with two instead of one, especially when that person could fly. "'Sides. Can appreciate de view from here."

Kurt said nothing for a moment, and Gambit hoped he'd dropped the subject. No such luck.

"She spoke highly of you, know."

Gambit's gaze immediately whipped back to him.

"She did?" He blinked, realizing his mistake when Kurt grinned. "I-I mean, of course she did. I did save her from that fils de puntain, after all."

"Ja, but it was more than that, Remy." Kurt said, moving closer. "She speaks of your prowess and your kindness in taking care of her as she got used to living here. But I can see and hear between the lines. Shadow lights up talking about you. Admiration paints her words. She blushes when you ask about you and her. She cares for you, mein freund."

His golden eyes bored into Gambit's black and red. "Indeed, it would not surprise me if she loves you."

Gambit's shoulders jerked as if he'd been shot, and he immediately crushed the emotion that threatened to leak out. He looked away, letting out a rueful laugh.

"Hah! I doubt dat." He puffed his chest out. "Scoundrels like me? We too busy for love. Too busy sinnin'." Even to his ears, his bravado couldn't hide the bitter taste on his tongue.

"There is no love without sin." Kurt spoke, calmly. "Love is best measured in what we forgive."

Gambit's gaze fell back down to pool below. The ducks had now been successfully herded away, Shadow thanking Rogue before giving her a careful hug, making sure their thick hair shielded their skin from touching.

Hope, small and feeble, bloomed in his heart.

"You really think she might love me?" He asked quietly.

"Only she could answer that." Kurt replied, equally quiet. "But, if it reassures you...Yes. I think she might."

Gambit swallowed hard, his heart starting to beat a fast tattoo under his breast. Could she, maybe...?

The two women parted from each other, saying something to one another, before Rogue began to walk away, back towards the mansion. Shadow lingered for a moment, her gaze out towards the grounds beyond.

"Go to her, Remy." Kurt urged. Gambit nodded, glancing back to his friend.

"Thank you," he said. The Nightcrawler gave him a smile, before 'bamf'ing away in a puff of dark purple smoke.

Gambit took a steeling breath, before he carefully scaled down the wall, jumping down as soon as he could. The sound of his landing drew Shadow's attention, and she turned towards him, eyes wide with surprise.

"Where did you come from?" She asked, a humourous lilt to her voice.

"Always from where ya least expect, mon amie." He replied, grinning. Nerves hummed through him like his powers, except they were also causing butterflies to swarm madly in his stomach. "Whatcha doin' out here?"

"Some ducks mistook the pool for the lake." Shadow explained. "I tried to get them to see reason, but apparently it was falling on deaf ears, least 'til Rogue arrived and helped me convince them otherwise."

"Good to hear." Gambit nodded, his heart pounding hard, only half-listening as he tried to piece his words together. He was going to say it this time, he really was. "Hey, Shadow, I been meaning to talk to ya 'bout somethin'. Somethin' important."

"Oh?" She blinked up at him, eyes wide with her full attention. "What about?"

Gambit took a breath, wetting his lips.

"Well, ya see, I-"

"Guys!" Scott's voice interrupted them, the urgency in his tone making them look towards where he was standing in the doorway. "I think you need to come and see this, ASAP."

Gambit almost wanted to scream bloody murder, but something about the look on Scott's face managed to contain his anger. He and Shadow glanced at each other, before following him into the main room, where the TV was on, centring on a news report from the government. All the other X-Men were there, including Professor Xavier, whose expression was grave.

"What's goin' on?" Gambit asked.

"Henry Gyrich is attempting to use his governmental contacts to push through anti-mutant legislation." Xavier explained, his eyes fixed on the screen. "It is known as the Mutant Containment Bill."

"Dat don't sound good." Gambit murmured.

"That's another word for internment camps, isn't it?" Shadow said quietly. "Like they did with Japanese citizens during the Second World War."

"The very same." Beast nodded. "I have noticed that the rhetoric used to justify those is similar if not exactly the same as what Gyrich is using now."

A chill crept over Gambit's skin, especially when he glanced to Shadow, who now hugging herself tightly. He'd had a taste of internment and the slavery linked to it, and didn't want to experience that again. And certainly not have any of his other friends experience it too - it had torn him up to see Jubilee, all but a child, in a suppression collar and forced to labour, and Storm to be imprisoned in her worst nightmare.

To watch it happen to Shadow?

Bile churned in his stomach.

"I will need to fight this legislation with everything I have." Xavier was saying. "I will require a team to go with me to these debates. They will be long and arduous, especially against an opponent as consumed by his hatred as Gyrich is." The Professor turned to the group. "But I must. The freedom of all mutants is resting on me. This bill must be defeated."

A chorus of nods from the assembled group. "Cyclops, I trust you can assemble a team?"

"Of course, Professor." He nodded. "I'll let you know shortly."

"Thank you. If you'll please excuse me, I need to prepare myself." And with that, Xavier left the room. The others split off as well, muttering anxiously among themselves.

"Shit." Shadow breathed, running a hand through her hair. "I...I think I need to call my parents. A-And my friends."

"Go do it, petite." Gambit rested a hand on her back. "Jus' in case this don't work out."

Shadow made to step away, before she hesitated.

"Wait. Wasn't there something you wanted to tell me, Remy?" She asked, looking up at him.

Gambit winced, smiling weakly. It not longer felt like the right time.

"No, chère," he said, gently pushing her back. "Go speak to ya folks. It nothing dat can't wait a little longer. 'Til all dis be over."

She looked up at him uncertainly, before nodding, walking off to find the mansion's phone.

Gambit would soon come to regret those words.

7 notes · View notes