Part 20 (1/2)

”Glad to see you, old man,” said the figure in the overcoat. ”I don't know which of us looks the more comic.”

”Why the dyed moustache, and why this?” pointing to a faded fez which protruded from one of his pockets.

White reserved his tale until t.i.toff's friend had left us, after promising to return with food and water.

While the guard was chasing him in Koum-kapou, White related, he turned the corner suddenly and saw an open doorway. He rushed into it, acting on impulse.

Just inside the door was a woman, who screamed. He put his hand over her mouth, then dodged down a narrow pa.s.sage into the back room, while the pursuing guard raced past the house and up the street.

Very fortunately for White the woman was a Greek, and as such well disposed to the British. She hid him in a cupboard for an hour, and persuaded her husband, when he arrived home at midday, to provide a disguise.

White bought a fez and an overcoat, and blackened his moustache. The Greek was shorter and slighter than he, so that it was impossible to wear the overcoat without removing his own jacket and waistcoat. These he left in the house. The results, however, justified his loss, for when he went into the streets, during the afternoon, he was a perfect study of a broken-down Levantine.

He reached Galata too late for the beerhouse rendezvous, and was obliged, therefore, to spend the evening and night as best he could. As he wandered along the Rue de Galata a policeman stopped him and, according to the Near East habit, showed a cigarette without saying a word and signed that he wanted a light. This White supplied from the cigarette he was smoking. The gendarme pa.s.sed on, without deigning to thank the wretched looking man in a faded fez and torn coat.

A cafe and two cinemas filled his evening. Afterward, unable to hire a room at any hotel or lodging-house, because he had no _vecika_, he spent the night huddled behind a cemetery tombstone.

Next day he met t.i.toff's Russian friend in the German beerhouse, according to plan; and so to the hiding-place.

This hiding-place of ours was a disused workshop belonging to the Russian, who claimed to be a carpenter. Its only furniture was a crude bench and a long table. The floor lay inches deep in shavings through which the rats rustled all night and most of the day. There was one small window; but this we were told to keep covered by its iron shutter, in case somebody should look in from the street. A tiny yard led from the corner opposite the door to the bottom of a shaft, down which the dwellers on the upper floors of the building threw their rubbish.

In themselves these conditions were fairly bad; for apart from the lack of furniture, the atmosphere was always dusty and unpleasantly musty, and unless we opened the window the workshop remained in perpetual twilight. But the worst drawback of all was that only a flimsy part.i.tion separated us from the living room of a Turkish officer. His bedroom was above our wooden ceiling. Everything he did we could hear quite plainly, whether he coughed, spoke, whistled, removed his boots, or snored.

The Turkish officer, we realized, must likewise hear every movement of ours; so that whenever either he or his orderly or anybody else was in his rooms we maintained, perforce, a death-like stillness. We scarcely dared to whisper, or to tip-toe across the workshop on bootless feet.

In the daytime, the striking of a match had to be masked by sc.r.a.ping the shavings, so as to make a noise like a rat. After daylight smoking was impossible, because the glimmer would have shown through the many cracks in the part.i.tion.

We slept side by side on the wooden table, with rolled-up coats as pillows. White once woke up in the middle of the night and was horrified to hear me talking in my sleep. Fortunately, the Turk above was not awake, and so missed the performance. Afterward we never slept at the same time, but kept watch in turn, in case one of us should snore or otherwise attract attention. Four of the nights were broken into by machine-gun fire from a near-by roof, during British air-raids.

On my arrival White had told me that we must be particularly careful in the mornings, just after the Turkish officer left the house. The noises from the living room then suggested that somebody, probably the Turk's wife, was tidying it. This happened on three successive mornings. What worried us in particular was a scrunching and sc.r.a.ping behind the part.i.tion, which suggested that the wife suspected our presence and tried to look at us through the cracks.

Each time this occurred we crouched at the bottom of the part.i.tion, fingered our lips warningly, and scarcely dared to breathe. On the fourth day, when the Russian brought our food, we told him our suspicions.

”We believe this Turkish officer's wife knows of us,” said White.

”Every morning she comes to the part.i.tion and seems to be looking through it.”

The carpenter grinned.

”But,” he explained, ”the Turk has no wife. What you've been frightened of is his tame rabbit!”

Each day we hoped for news of the _Batoum_'s date of sailing. Three times it was postponed; and, bored and wretched, we remained perforce in the miserable workshop.

Unable to keep our minds as inactive as our bodies, we took the risk of leaving the window half open during the daytime, so that we might study our Russian textbooks, in readiness for Odessa. Seated on the shavings in a position to catch the shaft of light that streamed through the narrow panes, we pa.s.sed many hours with the copying and learning of Russian phrases.

When, after hours of study, our concentrative faculties became stale, the only alternative was to hope for success, and to live again in retrospect the extravagant happenings of the past few weeks. Most of the business usually a.s.sociated with the crudest melodrama had been there, I reflected--spies, policemen, disguises, chases, female accomplices, and bluff. Decidedly it had been thrilling; but for the future I desired intensely to experience such thrills only at second hand.

But even in this secluded room we were not to be spared the atmosphere of movie-horrifics. Another stock thrill was inflicted on us--The Face at the Window.

There had seemed no likelihood of discovery from the street. Even if we bared the window from its iron shutter, n.o.body could see into the room without raising himself on the ledge, for the lower panes were coated with an opaque glaze. At mealtimes, therefore, we let in the daylight by withdrawing the shutter.