Page 379 - tender-is-the-night

‘Other than the actors and directors?’
‘Every hotel guest—even travelling salesmen. Why, they
tried to send me up a dozen candidates, but Nicole wouldn’t
stand for it.’
Nicole reproved him when they were in their room alone.
‘Why so many highballs? Why did you use your word spic
in front of him?’
‘Excuse me, I meant smoke. The tongue slipped.’
‘Dick, this isn’t faintly like you.’
‘Excuse me again. I’m not much like myself any more.’
That night Dick opened a bathroom window, giving on
a narrow and tubular court of the château, gray as rats but
echoing at the moment to plaintive and peculiar music, sad
as a flute. Two men were chanting in an Eastern language
or dialect full of k’s and l’s—he leaned out but he could not
see them; there was obviously a religious significance in the
sounds, and tired and emotionless he let them pray for him
too, but what for, save that he should not lose himself in his
increasing melancholy, he did not know.
Next day, over a thinly wooded hillside they shot scraw-
ny birds, distant poor relations to the partridge. It was done
in a vague imitation of the English manner, with a corps of
inexperienced beaters whom Dick managed to miss by fir-
ing only directly overhead.
On their return Lanier was waiting in their suite.
‘Father, you said tell you immediately if we were near the
sick boy.’
Nicole whirled about, immediately on guard.
‘—so, Mother,’ Lanier continued, turning to her, ‘the boy

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