Graham Greene by The Spy's Bedside Book Page B

who apparently treated her without consideration, for he ordered from the menu without consulting her.
    They had been sitting there for nearly three-quarters of an hour, and I had become quite fascinated by the pale, wistful face of the pretty woman before me, when a newspaper hawker, well muffled up in his ragged
shuba,
entered from the street, and passing from one table to another came at last to mine.
    â€œThis is for you,” he said quickly in Russian. “Give me five copeks and attract no attention. Look in the margin.” And taking a paper from his bundle he laid it upon the table.
    In surprise I flung the coin upon the table, and taking up the newspaper saw some faint writing in pencil on the margin close to the heavily-printed heading. The words were in French, and written in a strange hand, evidently that of a Russian. They read:
    â€œBeware of Nicholas Levitski and Pauline Ozeroff who are sitting opposite you. They are agents of Secret Police.”
    WILLIAM LE QUEUX

19. I SPY
    harlie Stowe waited until he heard his mother snore before he got out of bed. Even then he moved with caution and tiptoed to the window. The front of the house was irregular, so that it was possible to see a light burning in his mother’s room. But now all the windows were dark. A searchlight passed across the sky, lighting the banks of cloud and probing the dark deep spaces between, seeking enemy airships. The wind blew fromthe sea, and Charlie Stowe could hear behind his mother’s snores the beating of the waves. A draught through the cracks in the window-frame stirred his nightshirt. Charlie Stowe was frightened.
    But the thought of the tobacconist’s shop which his father kept down a dozen wooden stairs drew him on. He was twelve years old, and already boys at the County School mocked him because he had never smoked a cigarette. The packets were piled twelve deep below, Gold Flake and Players, De Reszke, Abdulla, Woodbines, and the little shop lay under a thin haze of stale smoke which would completely disguise his crime. That it was a crime to steal some of his father’s stock Charlie Stowe had no doubt, but he did not love his father; his father was unreal to him, a wraith, pale, thin, indefinite, who noticed him only spasmodically and left even punishment to his mother. For his mother he felt a passionate demonstrative love; her large boisterous presence and her noisy charity filled the world for him; from her speech he judged her the friend of everyone, from the rector’s wife to the “dear Queen,” except the “Huns,” the monsters who lurked in Zeppelins in the clouds. But his father’s affection and dislike were as indefinite as his movements. Tonight he had said he would be in Norwich, and yet you never knew. Charlie Stowe had no sense of safety as he crept down the wooden stairs. When they creaked he clenched his fingers on the collar of his nightshirt.
    At the bottom of the stairs he came out quite suddenly into the little shop. It was too dark to see his way, and he did not dare touch the switch. For half a minute he sat in despair on the bottom step with his chin cupped in his hands. Then the regular movement of the searchlight was reflected through an upper window and the boy had time to fix in memory the pile of cigarettes, the counter, and the small hole under it. The footsteps of a policeman on the pavement made him grab the first packet tohis hand and dive for the hole. A light shone along the floor and a hand tried the door, then the footsteps passed on, and Charlie cowered in the darkness.
    At last he got his courage back by telling himself in his adult way that if he were caught now there was nothing to be done about it, and he might as well have his smoke. He put a cigarette in his mouth and then remembered that he had no matches. For a while he dared not move. Three times the searchlight lit the shop, while he muttered taunts and encouragements. “May as well