Mediterranean Nights Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    â€˜Good God! Thornton,’ I exclaimed, ‘you’re lucky to be alive. What in the world saved you?’
    â€˜Lisabetta found me and cut me down,’ he said casually.
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜Hidden them,’ I suggested, ‘or taken a chance by passing them on to someone else.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜I still don’t understand,’ I murmured.
    â€˜Don’t you?’ His blue eyes twinkled in the sunshine. ‘
She
was our agent who spotted him on the boat, and she onlyplayed 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