The Luck of Thirteen | Page 6

was the Feast. Mahommedans were everywhere. By the
women's trousers, which twinkled beneath the shrouding veils, one
could see that they were gorgeously dressed. Befezzed men were
lounging and smoking in all the café's.
In the evening once more we wandered up through the old Turkish
quarter. We heard a curious noise like a hymn played by bagpipes,
rhythmically accompanied in syncopation by a very flabby drum.
Round the corner came four jolly niggers blowing pipes, and the
drummer behind them. Very slim young men with bright sashes and
light trousers were twisting, posturing, and dancing joyfully. One of
them threw to Jo the most graceful kiss she had ever seen.
We left Salonika in the morning, having been wakened by new sounds.
Thousands of marching feet, songs. This was puzzling.
In the 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 coupé 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