Page 283 - tender-is-the-night

the mad hand clutching the steering wheel, righted itself,
swerved once more and shot off the road; it tore through
low underbrush, tipped again and settled slowly at an angle
of ninety degrees against a tree.
The children were screaming and Nicole was screaming
and cursing and trying to tear at Dick’s face. Thinking first
of the list of the car and unable to estimate it Dick bent away
Nicole’s arm, climbed over the top side and lifted out the
children; then he saw the car was in a stable position. Before
doing anything else he stood there shaking and panting.
‘You—!’ he cried.
She was laughing hilariously, unashamed, unafraid,
unconcerned. No one coming on the scene would have
imagined that she had caused it; she laughed as after some
mild escape of childhood.
‘You were scared, weren’t you?’ she accused him. ‘You
wanted to live!’
She spoke with such force that in his shocked state Dick
wondered if he had been frightened for himself—but the
strained faces of the children, looking from parent to par-
ent, made him want to grind her grinning mask into jelly.
Directly above them, half a kilometer by the winding
road but only a hundred yards climbing, was an inn; one of
its wings showed through the wooded hill.
‘Take Topsy’s hand,’ he said to Lanier, ‘like that, tight,
and climb up that hill—see the little path? When you get
to the inn tell them ‘La voiture Divare est cassée.’ Some one
must come right down.’
Lanier, not sure what had happened, but suspecting the

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