Page 376 - tender-is-the-night

Sealyhams to one maid and the pair of Pekinese to the oth-
er. It is not necessarily poverty of spirit that makes a woman
surround herself with life—it can be a superabundance of
interest, and, except during her flashes of illness, Nicole was
capable of being curator of it all. For example with the great
quantity of heavy baggage—presently from the van would
be unloaded four wardrobe trunks, a shoe trunk, three hat
trunks, and two hat boxes, a chest of servants’ trunks, a
portable filing-cabinet, a medicine case, a spirit lamp con-
tainer, a picnic set, four tennis rackets in presses and cases,
a phonograph, a typewriter. Distributed among the spaces
reserved for family and entourage were two dozen supple-
mentary grips, satchels and packages, each one numbered,
down to the tag on the cane case. Thus all of it could be
checked up in two minutes on any station platform, some
for storage, some for accompaniment from the ‘light trip
list’ or the ‘heavy trip list,’ constantly revised, and carried
on metal-edged plaques in Nicole’s purse. She had devised
the system as a child when travelling with her failing moth-
er. It was equivalent to the system of a regimental supply
officer who must think of the bellies and equipment of three
thousand men.
The Divers flocked from the train into the early gath-
ered twilight of the valley. The village people watched the
debarkation with an awe akin to that which followed the
Italian pilgrimages of Lord Byron a century before. Their
hostess was the Contessa di Minghetti, lately Mary North.
The journey that had begun in a room over the shop of a
paperhanger in Newark had ended in an extraordinary

376 Tender is the Night