OFF TO MONTENEGRO


Back to Nish in the rain, and Jo was wearing a cotton frock. There may
be more dismal towns than this Nish, but I have yet to see them, and
this, although the great squares were packed with gaily coloured
peasants--some feast, we imagined--carts full of melons, melons on the
ground, melons framing the faces of the greedy--cerise green-rind moons
projecting from either cheek. The Montenegrin consul was not at home, so
off we went to the Foreign Office to give a letter to Mr. Grouitch, who
sent us to the Sanitary Department of the War Office (henceforth known
as S.D.W.O.). S.D.W.O. wouldn't move without a letter from "Sir Paget."
We got the letter from "Sir Paget" and back to the S.D.W.O., to find it
shut in our faces, and to learn that it did not reopen till four.

Then came the matter of Jo's tooth. This abscess had been nagging all
the time, it had vigorously tried to get between Jo and the scenery. We
had sought dentists in Salonika, rejecting one because his hall was too
dirty, a second because she (yes, a she) was practising on her father's
certificates, the third, a little Spaniard, had red-hot pokered the
gums thereof and only annoyed it. But we had heard there was a Russian
dentist in Nish, a very good one. The Russian dentist turned out to be a
girl, and tiny--she spoke no Serb, but Jo managed, by means of the
second cousinship of the language, to make out what she said in Russian.

[Illustration: PEASANT WOMEN IN GALA COSTUME--NISH.]

"The tooth must come out," squeaked the small dentist.