Mediterranean Nights (4 page)

Remember?—Wilde's poem about the man in the condemned cell, The Ballad of Reading Gaol', wasn't it? Well, that's what I did less than a month ago in Paris. Look—you can still see the mark about my neck!

I soon stopped dancing, though—some glimmer of sanity must have penetrated the pain, and I realised that the more I jigged the more the noose tightened round my windpipe.

The cord had stretched a little, and I found that as my legs hung slack I could just touch the floor with the tip of one toe. It wasn't enough to bear my weight, but it eased the strain a fraction.

I knew then, as I hung there with the blood drumming in my ears and my eyeballs straining out of their sockets, that I had just about ten minutes to live. I couldn't see the bathroom any more—the pain became excruciating—and I fainted.

Thornton stopped talking suddenly and stooped to examine a flower-bed, leaving me breathless.

‘Good God! Thornton,' I exclaimed, ‘you're lucky to be alive. What in the world saved you?'

‘Lisabetta found me and cut me down,' he said casually.

‘Lisabetta?' I said, puzzled. ‘How did she come to be in your room?'

He answered my question by another. ‘What would you have done if you'd been in Essenbach's shoes—expecting to be arrested by the French, and desperately anxious to save your papers?'

‘Hidden them,' I suggested, ‘or taken a chance by passing them on to someone else.'

‘Exactly—when Lisabetta got back to her room she found him there. As one German to another he begged her to get them through. The second he'd gone she came across to me.'

‘I still don't understand,' I murmured.

‘Don't you?' His blue eyes twinkled in the sunshine. ‘
She
was our agent who spotted him on the boat, and she only
played the Hun in the train on the chance of getting to know him. It's one of the rules of the service that even if your own side gets up against you through ignorance you must never show your hand until your job is done. A necessary convention for some occasions, perhaps, but in this case it nearly cost me my life.'

STORY II

I
NOW
present a comic—at least that was my intent. This is also one of my earliest attempts at portraying character by dialect. I soon learned that Americans ‘don't talk like that' or Scotsmen, or Cockneys or Jews. At least, they say they don't, however skilfully their idiosyncrasies of speech are rendered by much more able pens than mine.

Whether that is so or not one fact may be noted here for such readers as aspire to authorship. The British public, and even more so that of the United States, do not like books in which the main characters speak in anything but plain English. However well done it may be, dialect hangs up the reader, and a really accomplished author should have the ability to indicate the origins of his people by more subtle yet quite unmistakable means.

Dialect is sheer hell to write, anyway, so why spend hours of agony wrestling with the vowels and consonants of a single sentence when the result is to give umbrage to potential ‘faithful readers' who happen to be Irish, Lancastrians, or even Etonians, and at the same time bore others with the unnecessary distortion of normal speech.

Bollinger is so unquestionably one of the few consistently great champagnes that, having read this story, no one, I feel sure, will infer that the drinking of it normally makes people ‘see things what they didn't ought'. I must have consumed at least a lorry load of Bollinger in my time and never met a headache in a bottle of it—except, yes, once. But that was in a rather queer spot in Madrid, and the Bollinger wasn't Bollinger, although it had the temerity to call itself so with the curious and sinister sub-title of ‘Green Stripe'. However, I'm a little older now, and the whole of that rather hectic episode is quite another story.

BOLLINGER—
VERY DRY

A
S WE
lounged under the awning on the deck of the Nile boat we had an excellent view of the Temple of Karnak.

Later we were to go ashore and inspect the famous Hall of Columns—that wonderful monument to the greatness of an ancient people which has defied alike the buffets of the elements and the neglect of man for close on four thousand years. Naturally, everyone was talking of Egypt and the Egyptians.

The girl with the protruding teeth and soulful eyes leaned towards me. ‘How wonderful it must have been to live in those days,' she lisped, ‘to know the men who planned these marvellous buildings—I am sure they must have had great minds.'

‘Perhaps,' I said. ‘Life must have been jolly uncomfortable, all the same.'

‘Oh, no, Mr. Waverley,' she answered me earnestly, ‘think of the ease and luxury in which Cleopatra lived'; she sniffed, and her rather bulging eyes yearned for the romantic. ‘Life must have been wonderful then—so different from this dull and sordid age of commerce.'

That genial American, Mr. Benjamin P. Hooker, twisted his cigar in the corner of his mouth as he cut in: ‘Say, young lady, these ancient fellows weren't all they're painted—no, by Gee.'

She gave him a little superior smile. ‘They have left their monuments to speak for them, Mr. Hooker—they must have been great men.'

‘I'll not say they weren't great men,' agreed the American, ‘but you can cut out all the milk and honey stuff—right now, take that from me.'

‘Oh, but dear Mr. Hooker, everybody knows that the Egyptians were a most cultured people—the Courts of the Pharaohs were magnificent.'

Hooker twirled his cigar adroitly with lips and tongue. ‘I guess you're all wrong,' he drawled, ‘though I've no personal knowledge of those Pharaoh men.'

‘If you read Budge and Flinders Petrie, Mr. Hooker'—there was a trace of asperity in the girl's tone—‘you would
be better qualified to talk upon the subject—if you like I will lend you a little book.'

He shook his head. ‘That's sure nice of you, Miss Burridge, but I don't take much stock in books—still, the way I figure it out, these Egyptian guys would be about on a level with the Carthaginians as far as culture goes.'

‘What have the Cathaginians got to do with it?' I asked.

‘Say,' he laughed, ‘have I never told you folks about my little trip to the ancient and honourable city of Carthage—there was a mighty powerful people, if you like.'

‘No,' I said, ‘but Carthage was destroyed hundreds of years ago, even the ruins have disappeared in the sands.'

‘Maybe,' he nodded, ‘but I've been to Carthage way back in the centuries, all the same. I'll say it's a queer yarn, but I'll hand you out the story if you like?'

The stout gentleman and the elderly Scottish lady drew their chairs a little closer, and, in an accent redolent of the great cities of the Middle West, Benjamin P. Hooker went on:

‘Well, it was this way—me and the Professor man were quartered in the same hotel way outside Algiers. An' me bein' a citizen of the United States, which is entirely synonymous with a seeker after knowledge, it was nohow surprising that I should cultivate that little old man.

‘Say, folks! he was a marvel, and no mistake—I guess there was mighty little he didn't know. He could tell you the time the moon got up—or the way to make a peach-gin slosh; he knew how many wives Mahomet had—and why the emancipation of women weren't nohow possible in the Bismarck Isles. Yes, Sir—he was a compendium of Ten Thousand Facts, and a History of the World throughout the ages, done up in one.

‘So when he came to me one morning bright and early with a smile like a churchwarden at a baby-wettin' on his face, and suggested a trip to the ruins of Carthage—I grabbed the opportunity like a parson does the collection.

‘I put it up to him that I'd figured on going myself that same afternoon, and I'd be mighty glad if he'd take a seat in the automobile I'd rented for that purpose… I hadn't—no, Sirr—that was just my way of lettin' the old dry-as-dust know that the exes, were all on me.

‘Well, we hit the trail for what was left of Carthage City with a packet of
foie gras
sandwiches and a couple of bottles of Bollinger—very dry. That Professor man sure knew a heap about fine wine, and I'd already tumbled to it that he yielded up his store of knowledge easier under the pleasant stimulus of alcoholic beverages.

‘Have you ever been to Carthage? No? Well, it was some city, let me tell you, an' mighty interestin' I found it. I doped the brain-box, and he was as chatty as a political agent on election day. He handed out the highbrow stuff in doo proportion as the Bollinger went in.

‘I sat down in the shadow of a hunk of wall, but that little old Professor man was here, there, and everywhere, poking about among them ruins with a bit of stick, as active as a two-year-old. Suddenly he gives a yelp of joy and comes running up to me; he had a chunk of somethin' in his hand. I gave it the once over and it looked like broken pottery to me, but he was as delighted. About six inches long, it was, and all done over with pothooks and hangers—that was writing, so he said—Cu-ne-form, I think he called it, and I took that piece of nonsense in my hand.

‘Now, folks—this is what gets me beat—it's Benjamin P. Hooker speaking—and I'm on the level—what I'm going to tell you is a stone cold fact.
When I looked at that tablet thing I found myself reading that Cu-ne-form stuff as easy as A B C.
Yep, you may stare, but it wasn't fancy, and what's more that artistic piece of ancient calligraphy was addressed to me!

‘It's a fact—believe you me, I certainly thought I'd got the sun for a moment, but it was all O.K. There was the Professor man, and the Bollinger, very dry, and there was yours truly sopping up the Cu-ne-form just like he'd been raised to it in Kansas City.

‘It was what they call Billy-doo, I reckon—fixing a date for that very evening with a little bit of fancy goods down in the street of the Melon Sellers. That street in ancient Carthage was just about what Broadway is to us. She was a sort of nun, too—well, priestess you might say—anyhow, I was having some hectic affair with that little girl—and I found we was well acquainted, too. You mayn't believe it,
but at that moment I could see her just as plain as I see you. A prettier piece of trouble never took me for a sugar daddy, and that's saying some.

‘Well, I'll tell you, the idea of that date with the candy kid got me all hot and bothered—I was just dippy about that girl, then I looked up, and what do you think I saw? There wurn't no Professor man, there wurn't no Bollinger, very dry. I thought I'd gone loopy all of a sudden—but I didn't have much time to figure it out. Standing just in front of me there was a great big burly guy, with a curly black beard, all rigged out in a little silk shirt waist, and shiny brass armour. He spoke to me in some lingo unknown—Punic, I reckoned it to be—but I understood it O.K.

‘ “Say, boob, what in heck d'you think you're doin' here?” he said, or words with that same meaning.

‘Well, I certainly thought I had as much right there as him, so I started in to tell him where he got off.

‘ “Say, Mr. Movie Man,” I said, “you ain't bought these ruins, have you? I'd just hate to detain a busy coon like you—but you sure spoil my view.”

‘He didn't seem to get that any, and he says: “You get to hell out of here up on to them ramparts—that's your home from home. Now shift!”

‘Then I had another look around. Golly, but I got some shock. Them ruins had clean vanished and Carthage stood there just as it did before the flood. Villas, temples, public squares, and the whole caboodle—but my immediate attention was centred on that brass-clad stiff.

‘Just batty with rage, he was. He up with a horrid-looking cat-o'-nine-tails and lammed me over the shoulders with it, like Babe Ruth hits the ball—Jiminy, but it made me hop. It was just about then that I tumbled to it—that I'd lost my pants. Instead I was all swell and dandy in a little cotton frock—just like a Sunday school kid. Sure—you can laugh, all right—I laughed a bit myself at first, but not for long— no, Sirr. It dawned on me that Old King Cole in the tin rigout was a Carthaginian Cen-too-rion, and I was a Sammy in his little bunch. Crikey! I can feel that cat-o'-nine tails now. He ran me back to those ramparts, laying on like hell all the time, and cussing me for bein' fresh with him—me, a Barbarian mercenary. Yep! that's what I was—I'd been
and landed slick in the middle of one of them Punic wars.

‘When I got on to them ramparts I found lots of other guys all rigged out like me. Every colour under the sun they were, and a Roman camp way over opposite.

‘It was no picnic on that wall, I'll tell the world; those Roman stiffs were busy doin' the evening hate stuff on us poor bums. Arrows flying in all directions, there were, and lumps of stone which fellers were hurling with a kind of sling. A great buck negro come up to me and slapped me on the back. “Come on, yo' skate,” he yelled. “Lend a hand at dat dar bar,” and he pushed me towards a bunch of flats who were hauling on a kind of capstan thing. I got busy, and Lordy—didn't I sweat. We were winding up a powerful big catapult affair with a lump of rock the size of a Ford car in it; say, you should ha' seen that morsel fly—up in the air it went—and down, down, down—slick into the Roman camp way over.

‘Believe me, friends, we just don't know what war can be. About fifty of them Romans got busy with a long sort of ladder. They ran it against our wall, then up they shinned like monkeys up a tree, and that buck nigger he yelled at me: “Hoi, fat face—dis ain't no toime fer put an' take, get busy wiv da molten lead.”