I had gained all that I wanted, and much more than I could have expected so soon. There was no more to be said and no excuse for our lingering at the table.
We went out into the lounge to drink our coffee, both looking at English illustrated papers a fortnight old. Their dullness seemed intolerable in this weary gap of inactivity that had to be lived through before the time came for our final risk.
“I can’t stand this any longer,” said Edmund suddenly, throwing down a sheet of snapshots of advertising peeresses at race-meetings, foolishly photographed in the awful ungainliness which the camera reveals in the act of walking.
“Let’s go out and walk or drive somewhere.”
“We can’t both leave. It’s not safe,” I reminded him.
I persuaded him to go out alone, for I felt I could better endure the irksomeness without him.
I returned to my room and sat by the window looking out over the sea, and listening to the sound of its waves on the sea-wall. The sound of the sea is always soothing and always melancholy, but it is especially so in distant places, for the sea has but one voice, everywhere its murmur is the same that we hear at home.
Edmund came in about midnight, and we sat together in the dark by the window.
Next door to the hotel there was a café, and its chairs and tables were spread out over the wide footpath. We could see under its electric lights the tops and tassels of tarbooshes, and the white discs of straw hats whose owners sat sipping coffee or lager beer, and eating olives and strange sweets. Most of them were talking loudly, and a strange babel of Arabic, Greek, Italian and French came up to us from the pavement.
“I have seen the policeman on duty,” said Edmund, “and put him all right with fifty piastres. The street will be as quiet as the grave when that infernal café shuts up.”