‘You’re absurd!’ said Miss Reilly.
She sounded quite angry.
‘Oh, I realize that it’s quite out of the question,’ said Mr Coleman cheerfully. ‘So, if I’ve got to do something, I don’t much care what it is so long as it isn’t mugging in an office all day long. I was quite agreeable to seeing a bit of the world. Here goes, I said, and along I came.’
‘And a fat lot of use you must be, I expect!’
‘There you’re wrong. I can stand up on the dig and shout “Y’Allah” with anybody! And as a matter of fact I’m not so dusty at drawing. Imitating handwriting used to be my speciality at school. I’d have made a first-class forger. Oh, well, I may come to that yet. If my Rolls-Royce splashes you with mud as you’re waiting for a bus, you’ll know that I’ve taken to crime.’
Miss Reilly said coldly: ‘Don’t you think it’s about time you started instead of talking so much?’
‘Hospitable, aren’t we, nurse?’
‘I’m sure Nurse Leatheran is anxious to get settled in.’
‘You’re always sure of everything,’ retorted Mr Coleman with a grin.
That was true enough, I thought. Cocksure little minx.
I said dryly: ‘Perhaps we’d better start, Mr Coleman.’
‘Right you are, nurse.’
I shook hands with Miss Reilly and thanked her, and we set off.
‘Damned attractive girl, Sheila,’ said Mr Coleman.
‘But always ticking a fellow off.’
We drove out of the town and presently took a kind of track between green crops. It was very bumpy and full of ruts.
After about half an hour Mr Coleman pointed to a big mound by the river bank ahead of us and said: ‘Tell Yarimjah.’
I could see little black figures moving about it like ants.
As I was looking they suddenly began to run all together down the side of the mound.
‘Fidos,’ said Mr Coleman. ‘Knocking-off time. We knock off an hour before sunset.’
The expedition house lay a little way back from the river.
The driver rounded a corner, bumped through an extremely narrow arch and there we were.
The house was built round a courtyard. Originally it had occupied only the south side of the courtyard with a few unimportant out-buildings on the east. The expedition had continued the building on the other two sides. As the plan of the house was to prove of special interest later, I append a rough sketch of it here.
All the rooms opened on to the courtyard, and most of the windows—the exception being in the original south building where there were windows giving on the outside country as well. These windows, however, were barred on the outside. In the south-west corner a staircase ran up to a long flat roof with a parapet running the length of the south side of the building which was higher than the other three sides.
Mr Coleman led me along the east side of the courtyard and round to where a big open verandah occupied the centre of the south side. He pushed open a door at one side of it and we entered a room where several people were sitting round a tea-table.
‘Toodle-oodle-oo!’ said Mr Coleman. ‘Here’s Sairey Gamp.’
The lady who was sitting at the head of the table rose and came to greet me.
I had my first glimpse of Louise Leidner.
Chapter 5
Tell Yarimjah
I don’t mind admitting that my first impression on seeing Mrs Leidner was one of downright surprise. One gets into the way of imagining a person when one hears them talked about. I’d got it firmly into my head that Mrs Leidner was a dark, discontented kind of woman. The nervy kind, all on edge. And then, too, I’d expected her to be—well, to put it frankly—a bit vulgar.
She wasn’t a bit like what I’d imagined her! To begin with, she was very fair. She wasn’t a Swede, like her husband, but she might have been as far as looks went. She had that blonde Scandinavian fairness that you don’t very often see. She wasn’t a young woman. Midway between thirty and forty, I should say. Her face was rather haggard, and there was some grey hair mingled with the fairness. Her eyes, though, were lovely. They were the only eyes I’ve ever come across that you might truly describe as violet. They were very large, and there were faint shadows underneath them. She was very thin and fragile-looking, and if I say that she had an air of intense weariness and was at the same time very much alive, it sounds like nonsense—but that’s the feeling I got. I felt, too, that she was a lady through and through. And that means something—even nowadays.