X laughed. "Oh, as far as that goes," she said, "we are all in the same boat."
"Raft," I corrected in a nervous flutter.
The Young Man looked at me and smiled. I realised that he thought I was trying to make a cheap joke, such as one might have been capable of in the country lane.
"I must introduce myself," he went on. "I am Captain T—— of V——. I am on my way there now. It's strange you should just have arrived to-day as I was crossing the river...."
I murmured something about tea and fled into the men's hut, where Arten was boiling the kettle.
"Arten," I stammered out in broken Turkish, "the English Pasha will have tea with us. You must bring the cups clean. The English never have dirty cups."
Arten smiled back very genially; he breathed into a cup and wiped it vigorously with one of his dirty cloths, by which I concluded that he understood what I had said to him. I had learnt up all the words about dirt and the desirability of washing.
It was raining slightly and we had to ask the Young Man under cover. X and I sat down on one of the camp-beds and the Young Man sat on the opposite bed, sticking his long legs out through the door.
"You speak Turkish, then?" he said to me as I returned.
So he had heard my injunctions! I hastily denied any claim to a knowledge of the language. Arten came in with the tea, which he placed on the floor between the Young Man's top-boots.