that the shop was closed; so I reached up and fumbled round in the ivy until my fingers got a grip on the edge of the wall, then hove myself up and lay for a moment stretched out at full length on the top, well hidden by the heavy growth of ivy, listening and watching.
My friend, if you want to find out something, let me tell you there is nothing like quiet watching. No matter where you watch, you always see something. Animals understand this principle better than humans, and the wilder an animal is, the more patient he is about this watching game. I'd learned the lesson already; so now I just lay there with every sense alert, waiting for something to turn up—and pretty soon it did.
The garden was perhaps about thirty metres long by twenty wide, and was a sort of little terrace, completely shaded by closely trimmed marronniers. I had been perhaps ten minutes on the top of the wall when I heard a door open softly and the sound of light footfalls on the gravel. The trees were trimmed a little higher than the wall, and, looking under their low branches, I saw two figures coming toward the door. As they drew near I was able to make them out, even in the gloom, as Ivan and Chu-Chu.
Straight up to where I lay they marched and halted directly underneath. I could have reached down and touched Chu-Chu's straw hat. He was in the costume of an artisan—a plumber or painter—and wore a long cotton blouse buttoned round his wrists, and a black straw hat.
Apparently he and the Chief had disagreed about
