The Luck of Thirteen | Page 6

train a young Greek told us that his nation had mobilized against the Bulgars, but that it was not very serious. He said that there had been very friendly feeling in Greece for England, but that we had done our best to kill it.
"You see, monsieur," he explained, "your offer to give away our land. It is not yours to give. You say that does not matter, but that colonies, great colonies in Africa will replace the small part of land that we may surrender. Kavalla is more valuable to Grecian hearts than all Africa, for how could we desert our Grecian brothers and place them beneath the rule of the Turk or Bulgar?"
On the train were more American doctors. One had just arrived, and was still full of enthusiasm for scenery and sanitation. Also there was Princess ---- surrounded by packing cases. Some months earlier she had visited our hospitals in Vrntze and she had asked if one of our V.A.D.'s could be sent to her as housemaid. Seeing her in the station, Jo involuntarily ran over in her mind, was she "sober, honest and obliging?"
The American doctors and we picnicked together. We ate bully beef and a huge water melon. The heat was awful. The velvet seats seemed to invade one's body and come through at the other side. One of the doctors sat on the step of the train, and Jo found him nodding and smiling as he dreamt. She rescued him before he fell off.
After twelve hours they left us. Uskub once more and an hour to wait. We sat behind trees in boxes on the platform and ate omelet with a nice old Jew and his ten-year-old daughter, who already spoke five languages.
Then to sleep. We found our half coup�� contained a second seat which could be pulled down, so we each had a bed. At four in the morning we were awakened by the most awful imitation of a German band.
What had happened? We looked out. It was barely dawn, and a wretched little orchestra was grouped at the edge of the tiny station. Every instrument was cracked and was tuned one-sixteenth tone different from its companions. What it lacked in musical ability it made up in energy.
Why, oh, why at that hour, we never found out. Perhaps it was in honour of the Princess, poor lady!
[Illustration]
CHAPTER III
OFF TO MONTENEGRO
Back to Nish in the rain, and Jo was wearing a cotton frock. There may be more dismal towns than this Nish, but I have yet to see them, and this, although the great squares were packed with gaily coloured peasants--some feast, we imagined--carts full of melons, melons on the ground, melons framing the faces of the greedy--cerise green-rind moons projecting from either cheek. The Montenegrin consul was not at home, so off we went to the Foreign Office to give a letter to Mr. Grouitch, who sent us to the Sanitary Department of the War Office (henceforth known as S.D.W.O.). S.D.W.O. wouldn't move without a letter from "Sir Paget." We got the letter from "Sir Paget" and back to the S.D.W.O., to find it shut in our faces, and to learn that it did not reopen till four.
Then came the matter of Jo's tooth. This abscess had been nagging all the time, it had vigorously tried to get between Jo and the scenery. We had sought dentists in Salonika, rejecting one because his hall was too dirty, a second because she (yes, a she) was practising on her father's certificates, the third, a little Spaniard, had red-hot pokered the gums thereof and only annoyed it. But we had heard there was a Russian dentist in Nish, a very good one. The Russian dentist turned out to be a girl, and tiny--she spoke no Serb, but Jo managed, by means of the second cousinship of the language, to make out what she said in Russian.
[Illustration: PEASANT WOMEN IN GALA COSTUME--NISH.]
"The tooth must come out," squeaked the small dentist.
"Can't you save it?" prayed Jo; "it's the best one I've got, and the one to which I send all the Serbian meat."
"It must come out," squeaked the Russ.
"Can't you save it?" prayed Jo.
"It must come out," reiterated the Russ.
"You're very small," said Jo, doubtfully.
This annoyed the dentist. She pushed unwilling Jo into a chair, produced a pair of pincers, and, oh, woe! she wrenched to the north, she wrenched to the south, she wrenched to the east, and there was the tooth, nearly as big as the dentist herself.
"I never can eat Serbian meat again," murmured Jo as she mopped her mouth.
After tea we returned to the S.D.W.O., and by means of our letter and our Englishness we got in front of all the unfortunate people who had been waiting for hours, and received our passes, etc.,