But the bride hesitated. “I’m afraid, Mr. Yelverton,” she said, “that I’m not so good as the American girl you’ve got. She’s a professional, surely.”
As a matter of fact she was studying the piano in Paris, and was in Mürren for the winter holiday.
And then we struck up again and the crowd danced merrily till nearly three o’clock.
The following day was a Saturday. I spent a large part of the morning gossiping with old Mr. Humphreys, whose chief pleasures as an invalid seemed to be to play bridge and to smoke his pipe. Though his was rather a thoughtful disposition, as his deep-sunken eyes and shaggy brows suggested, yet he was always a cheerful and entertaining companion.
“I sometimes stay with my sister at Weybridge, in Surrey,” he explained, as I walked beside him while he wheeled his chair over the snowy road which leads out of the village along the edge of the deep precipice overlooking Lauterbrunnen in the misty valley far below. While we were in the bright keen air high-up above the clouds, with the sun shining brilliantly over a white picturesque world, below, in the valley, it was dark dull winter. “Very soon,” added my friend, “very soon I’ll have to go back to Constantinople, where I have a good many interests. But I shall only be there a few weeks. All this political trouble makes things very difficult financially. Have you ever been in Turkey?”
I replied in the negative, but added that it had long been my desire to go there, and see the beauties of the Bosphorus.
“Yes,” he said, “You ought to go. You’d find lots to interest you. Life in the Turkish capital and Turkish life is quite different from life in Europe. The Turk is always a polished gentleman and, moreover, the foreigner is now better protected in every way than the Turk himself, thanks to the laws made years ago.”
“That, I suppose, is why Constantinople before the war was such a hot-bed of European sharks, swindlers and bogus concession-hunters,” I remarked, with a smile, for I had heard much of the “four-flush” crowd from a friend who had interests in the Ottoman Empire.
“Exactly,” he laughed. “It is true that in Pera we have a collection of the very worst crooks in all Europe. But it is hoped that, under the new conditions, Turkey will expel them and begin a new and cleaner regime.”
As he spoke we turned a sharp corner, and Stanley Audley and his pretty wife, smart in another sports suit of emerald green that I had not before seen her wearing, shouted simultaneously the warning, “Achtung!”