As Sir Robert intimated, these other guests are a queer lot. There can not be more than twelve or fourteen, in all. The men are seedy, and rather silent. They sit about a good deal, reading the papers (copies of the more suggestive French weeklies are strewn about on every chair and sofa in the lounge), and they eye me and one another with a sort of cool distrust. The women, three or four in all, seem to come and go rather freely. And each has the eye, the manner, even the physical bearing, of the woman for whom the halfworld has no secrets. Then, there is a discreet, drifting class of transients—men from the Legation Quarter, I believe (often, indeed, they come in full uniform), who are always accompanied by young women. Sometimes, as it may happen, these are the familiar women of the place; but quite as often they are strangers to my eyes. And always, day and night, there is in the manner of the guests and in that of the little French manager and his half-caste clerk an air of carefully refraining from questions. It is as if every one said to every one else: “You are here, but you are quite safe, for I make it a rule never to see who comes or what goes on here. Perhaps one day I may have to ask the same discreet courtesy from you. It is quite all right, believe me.”
In this odd atmosphere I live and have my being. The building is a mere rambling collection of mansardes. The chairs in the bedrooms—at least, in my own—are of the common bent-iron variety usually seen in gardens. The beds are of the most simple iron sort, once painted with a white enamel that has been largely chipped off. The linen is threadbare, even ragged,—there is a hole in my nether sheet through which my foot slips at night, not infrequently catching there and waking me from dreams of the pillory and chains,—but it is not unclean. There would be no excuse for that, in a whole world of laundry-men. On each mantel and iron-legged table is an ash-tray that blatantly advertises a Japanese whisky.
Yes, in this odd atmosphere I live and, in a manner, breathe—I and the slim, beautifully dressed woman who walks so firmly on the balls of her feet. Whoever she may be, she belongs here no more than I.
Of course, the chances are all against—yet I wonder! For one thing, she is alone. I am positive of this. All the other guests I have seen, now, coming and going. But she never comes or goes—excepting apparently for a short walk each afternoon, and always unaccompanied. He would not have deserted her—away out here. Surely a man would not do that to a woman he has loved.
But wait—I am forgetting the sort of world this is. There is nothing—nothing—man does not do to woman. Or that woman does not do to man. Nothing is too subtly selfish, nothing too cruel.
To-day I mean to time my own walk with hers. I must see her in the light. I must observe her throat and her face.... At the thought of what I may see my nerves behave abominably. My forehead burns. My heart beats with an absurd irregularity. These facts alone appear to indicate that my place is not in this wild world of passion and conflict.
It is not wholly unpleasant here in my dingy little room—though the carpet is a rag, and the door between me and my next neighbor has shrunk its lock out of alignment and appears to be blocked off, on the farther side, by some bulky piece of furniture. This door opens on my side of the partition.
No, it is not so unpleasant. Outside, the sun is shining. To my nostrils comes floating the quaint, pungent odor that has in the minds of so many travelers characterized the East. Over the low-tiled roofs of a row of Chinese houses I can see—beyond an open space—the masonry wall of the fortified Legation Quarter, with a sentry-box peeping above it, and the flag of Italy, and trees.