“I know I’m abominably rude,” I said, “but I’m too tired. I want to lie down. Ask the padre if there isn’t somewhere we can lie down till dinner.”
It was too bad. Guests shouldn’t behave like that. There was another room, and it had a mattress on the floor, but there was no candle; a bit of blazing wood must be brought from the kitchen to light me into it; our bags must be fetched; the household was quite upset. I apologized and apologized, but at last I was able to tear off my sopping stockings, pull some of our blankets over me, and lie down in the darkness. I was falling into a kind of stupor. I could not get off my soaking garments, but it did not matter, fever kept me even too warm in them, and in a moment I—as the old-time novelists say—knew no more. During that moment I felt some one crawling on the mattress beside me, put out a hand, and touched Alex’s blazing cheek.
We were awakened and brought out to dinner. It did not seem real. I remember it like a delirium. There was hot soup, but each mouthful seemed a cannon ball to get through a closing throat, and there were corn bread and goat’s-milk cheese; the padre stood at the head of the table through the meal, holding the torch. He did not eat with us, Perolli said, because we were using all the dishes he had. It transpired, too, that there was but the one mattress in the house. The padre’s niece slept on it; he himself slept on the floor with a blanket. The niece was a sweet, round-cheeked little girl of about fourteen, quite the German Fräulein; she had been educated in Vienna and Munich, and seemed most desperately lonely in Shala, hungry for companionship and talk of the things she knew; but since the war and the wreck of central Europe she must stay in Shala. I saw a tragedy there. But I saw it very dimly through the mist of pain and fever.
Alex and I took the mattress, with the simple, direct selfishness of miserable animals; it was very narrow, but we lay head to foot on it and managed. Frances, Perolli, and Rexh slept in blankets beside us on the floor. All night long Alex moaned in her sleep, and I could not tell the difference between reality and delirium; only the knives in my lungs brought me out of the mists now and then to hear the ceaseless pouring sound of rain and feel the damp chill of the room.
In the gray morning Alex and I sat up and looked at each other.
“How do you feel?” said I.
“Fine,” said she. “Have you a fever?”
“Fever? Not a bit,” said I. “But I’ve been thinking. It’s the tenth, and I absolutely must be in Paris by the twentieth. It’s most important—a business matter. So I don’t think I’d better go on with you into the Merdite country. I think I’d better go back to Scutari and catch the boat from Durazzo next Tuesday.”
“But you can’t make it out of these mountains alone!” said she. “It’s a hundred and fifty miles and you don’t know the trails or the language.”
“Oh yes, I can!” I said. “Don’t talk nonsense, Alex dear.”