I couldn’t sleep all night; a fog-horn was groaning incessantly on the Sound, and I tossed half-sick between grotesque reality and savage frightening dreams. Toward dawn I heard a taxi go up Gatsby’s drive and immediately I jumped out of bed and began to dress—I felt that I had something to tell him, something to warn him about and morning would be too late.
Crossing his lawn I saw that his front door was still open and he was leaning against a table in the hall, heavy with dejection or sleep.
‘Nothing happened,’ he said wanly. ‘I waited, and about four o’clock she came to the window and stood there for a minute and then turned out the light.’
His house had never seemed so enormous to me as it did that night when we hunted through the great rooms for cig- arettes. We pushed aside curtains that were like pavilions and felt over innumerable feet of dark wall for electric light switches—once I tumbled with a sort of splash upon the keys of a ghostly piano. ere was an inexplicable amount of dust everywhere and the rooms were musty as though they hadn’t been aired for many days. I found the humidor on an unfamiliar table with two stale dry cigarettes inside. rowing open the French windows of the drawing-room we sat smoking out into the darkness.