Page 40 - tender-is-the-night

triever, having been adequate and something more.
As she stood in the fuzzy green light of the vegetable
garden, Dick crossed the path ahead of her going to his
work house. Nicole waited silently till he had passed; then
she went on through lines of prospective salads to a little
menagerie where pigeons and rabbits and a parrot made
a medley of insolent noises at her. Descending to another
ledge she reached a low, curved wall and looked down seven
hundred feet to the Mediterranean Sea.
She stood in the ancient hill village of Tarmes. The villa
and its grounds were made out of a row of peasant dwell-
ings that abutted on the cliff—five small houses had been
combined to make the house and four destroyed to make
the garden. The exterior walls were untouched so that from
the road far below it was indistinguishable from the violet
gray mass of the town.
For a moment Nicole stood looking down at the Medi-
terranean but there was nothing to do with that, even with
her tireless hands. Presently Dick came out of his one-room
house carrying a telescope and looked east toward Cannes.
In a moment Nicole swam into his field of vision, where-
upon he disappeared into his house and came out with a
megaphone. He had many light mechanical devices.
‘Nicole,’ he shouted, ‘I forgot to tell you that as a final ap-
ostolic gesture I invited Mrs. Abrams, the woman with the
white hair.’
‘I suspected it. It’s an outrage.’
The ease with which her reply reached him seemed to
belittle his megaphone, so she raised her voice and called,

40 Tender is the Night