I soon found that “letting myself go” had been a mistake; having once begun shivering I could not stop. It was a curious sensation: my body had taken command of the situation and was running away with me. I had an uneasy feeling that a lunatic ought not to feel cold or exhaustion, and I struggled hard to pull myself together, talking the while of my terror of Englishmen in general and Baylay in particular, in the hope that the Turks would ascribe the trembling to fear. They did. They showed me their rifles and knives and knobkerries and promised to kill off my English foes as they had done in the Dardanelles. Gradually my shivering wore itself out, but I felt colder than ever. I began joking with the crowd, telling what I would do to Baylay when I caught him. I was joking in a mist, and their voices were beginning to sound very far away. I knew I was on the point of fainting, and I made a mistake which might well have been fatal to our plans. I twisted my coat-button and said in English to Moïse, “Send us to bed.” It was a foolish, insensate thing to say. Had the crowd in the room contained anyone who knew English that single sentence was enough to show that Moïse was our confederate. The moment the words were out of my mouth I realised what I had done, and could have bitten my tongue out. By sheer good fortune, nobody understood, but I have never forgiven myself. The contrast between my weakness of spirit in Mardeen, and Hill’s superlative endurance later on in Constantinople when he kept a close tongue through a month of incredible illness and suffering in Gumush Suyu hospital, has cured me of any pride in my will-power. But the lesson was not entirely lost, and never again was my hatred of physical suffering allowed to gain the upper hand.
Luckily the crowd thought the order to change into dry things and go to bed emanated from Moïse. Hill helped to save the situation by sobbing out that he didn’t want dry clothes and preferred to remain as he was and contemplate his sins. He had to be forced into his pyjamas. Meantime Moïse had thrown me a towel and I was drying myself, joking with the mob as I did so. We noticed that at this they began muttering among themselves. Moïse told us later that the hotel-keeper said no lunatic would dry himself under the circumstances. Moïse replied I did it under his orders, which was true enough and satisfied everybody except the hotel-keeper, who was angry at the disturbance we had caused in his hotel and the damage done by the water to his bedding.
At the time we did not know what the muttering was about, but we saw something was wrong and raised a successful diversion by quarrelling amongst ourselves. Hill wanted to hold a prayer-meeting to ask forgiveness for our suicide, while I wanted him to obey the Turks who were protecting us from the English, and go to bed. In the end Moïse was asked by the hotel-keeper to make me shut up, as I was keeping everybody in the hotel awake. I obeyed Moïse, and so far as Hill was concerned he held his prayer-meeting and then turned in. I refused to go to bed myself, and plagued Moïse to give me back the money he had taken from me at the search, in order that I might buy a rifle from one of our audience to protect myself against Major Baylay and the English. After about an hour of fruitless begging and raving on my part the last of the onlookers went away. Our cart drivers and two villagers were brought in to support Bekir and Sabit in case we turned violent again and I was made to lie down.
My throat was too sore to let me sleep, so I saw that all six of our guards remained awake all night, with their weapons ready in their hands.
CHAPTER XXVI
IN WHICH THE SPOOK CONVICTS MOÏSE OF THEFT, CONVERTS
HIM TO HONESTY, AND PROMISES OMNIPOTENCE
Next morning the hotel-keeper came in early to survey the damage. His suspicions about our insanity had been partially set at rest by Moïse, who had shown him copies of the Yozgad doctors’ certificates of lunacy, but he still had his doubts and was out to get what compensation he could. He produced his broken clasp-knife and demanded another in its place.
“Why should we give you another?” I said, “it has nothing to do with us.”
“I broke it in cutting your companion down,” he said indignantly, pointing to Hill. “You’d have been dead by now but for this knife.”