Page 166 - tender-is-the-night

pains.’
Mr. McBeth took an immediate step that may only be
imagined, but that influenced the gendarme so as to make
him pull his mustaches in a frenzy of uneasiness and greed.
He made perfunctory notes and sent a telephone call to his
post. Meanwhile with a celerity that Jules Peterson, as a
business man, would have quite understood, the remains
were carried into another apartment of one of the most
fashionable hotels in the world.
Dick went back to his salon.
‘What HAP-pened?’ cried Rosemary. ‘Do all the Ameri-
cans in Paris just shoot at each other all the time?’
‘This seems to be the open season,’ he answered. ‘Where’s
Nicole?’
‘I think she’s in the bathroom.’
She adored him for saving her—disasters that could have
attended upon the event had passed in prophecy through
her mind; and she had listened in wild worship to his strong,
sure, polite voice making it all right. But before she reached
him in a sway of soul and body his attention focussed on
something else: he went into the bedroom and toward the
bathroom. And now Rosemary, too, could hear, louder and
louder, a verbal inhumanity that penetrated the keyholes
and the cracks in the doors, swept into the suite and in the
shape of horror took form again.
With the idea that Nicole had fallen in the bathroom and
hurt herself, Rosemary followed Dick. That was not the con-
dition of affairs at which she stared before Dick shouldered
her back and brusquely blocked her view.

166 Tender is the Night