Orient Express Read Online Free Page B

green carpet slippers beside him is looking into vacancy with large yellowbrown eyes, in his hand a long amber cigarette-holder that is bright gold when the sun strikes it.
    Sans connaître les classiques on ne peut être ni diplomate, ni politicien, ni orateur.… But one can sit in the shade where the cool wind rustles the vineleaves, letting the days slip through the fingers smooth and decorously shaped as the lumps of amber of the conversation beads with which one hand or the other constantly plays.
    Out of the gate snorting and grinding in low gear comes a staffcar full of Allied officers, glint of gold braid and a chattering of voices. A cloud of dust hides it as it crawls up the uneven road.
    A flock of sheep forms bleating out of the dust, followed by two shepherds who shout and throw stones and beat with their sticks until the sheep begin to flow through the narrow gate like water through the outlet in a trough.
    Sans connaître les classiques.… A party of the Inter-Allied policeforce has come up and they stare searchingly in the faces of the Turks in the café. There are two Italian gendarmes with shiny threecornered hats and buttons on their coattails, some British M.P.s with hard red necks, French flics with the whiskers familiar to Paris cartoonists. They are all redfaced and sweaty from their rounds and there is dust on their highly polished shoes. When they have stared their fill at the people in the café they turn and go through the gate into town. Under the vines no one has noticed them. The voices of the old men continue, and the slow movement of a hand stroking a beard. In the upper bowl of the narghiles there is a little red glow at long intervals when the smoker pulls deeply. Above the grey towers and the wall, kites with black curved wings and hawk-beaks circle in the porcelain-blue sky.
    8. Alexanders
    Going down to Therapia they pointed out the place where two nights before a French truck with a regimental fanfare in it had gone over the khud. Ah, monsieur, nous avons vécu des journées atroces, said the tall Greek lady beside me with a dangerous roll of her black eyes. At the next curve the car gave a terrible lurch to avoid an old man with a mule—Four of them were killed outright. They say they were dead drunk anyway. They never found the truck or the bodies … le Bosphore, vous comprenez. She smiled coyly with her large lips on which the rouge was restricted to a careful Cupid’s bow.
    At Therapia we sat on the terrace with the green swift Bosphorus in front of us and watched Englishmen in white flannels play tennis. A hot stagnant afternoon. Locusts whirred madly among the dusty cypresses. People in frock coats sat whispering round the little tables. Mr. Deinos who was starting a steamship line to run from Constantinople to New York, sat in a lavender grey linen suit between the two tall ladies with lurching eyes and Cupid’s-bow mouths coyly puckered.… Greece, he began, is going to fulfil her historic mission.…
    I slipped away and strayed into the bar. A British major with a face like the harvest moon was shaking up Alexanders. A man in a frock coat was trying to catch in his mouth olives that an American relief worker was tossing in the air. The talk in the bar was English, Oxford drawl, Chicago burr, Yankee twang, English and American as spoken by Greeks, Armenians, Frenchmen, Italians. Only the soberer people in the corners spoke French.
    â€”Intelligence service cleaned up another Bolo plot … yessiree. Collected all the Bolos in town and towed them up into the Black Sea in a leaky scow and left ’em there—Best place for them. Ungrateful beggars, these Russians.… Here we evacuate them from Odessa and Sebastopol and now they go turning red on us. The leader was a woman.… Picked her out of a room at the Tokatlian. When the A.P.C. knocked at the door she took off all her clothes and went to bed. Thought they’d be too