Eastern Nights - and Flights Part 22

"I've seen S., and the money's not lost."

White's Friday, the thirteenth of September, had been an exciting one.

He walked into the doorway of the Prisoners of War Bureau, and speaking in English, asked for Mr. S.

"Name?" inquired the porter.

"Mr. Henry O'Neill, from Tarsus."

"Do you know Mr. S.?"

"Why, certainly, I'm a friend of his." And White felt in his waistcoat pocket, as if searching for a card.

"His office is on the first floor," said the porter, satisfied. "Go straight up."

With a gulp of relief White pa.s.sed up the stairway. Like myself on the day before, he had to wait many minutes before Mr. S. was disengaged; and like myself he was horrified to see Levy, the Jew _kava.s.s_ who had brought his letters and parcels to Gumuch Souyou Hospital. The _kava.s.s_ beamed, and delivered himself of an oily greeting, but failed to remember where he had met White.

"You speak as an Englishman," he said, after a few words of conversation. "You are a English prisoner, not?"

"Of course I'm an English prisoner," admitted White, slapping Levy on the back. "My guard's waiting outside."

The _kava.s.s_ fetched a chair for White and seemed disposed to ask more troublesome questions. Just then the visitor who had been engaged with Mr. S. left the office, and White walked inside, praying that the _kava.s.s_ and the porter would not compare notes, and identify Mr. Henry O'Neill, of Tarsus, with the British prisoner whose guard was waiting in the street.

The door being closed White explained his real ident.i.ty to Mr. S., and offered apologies for the dangerous visit to which he had been forced by our desperate situation.

"You needn't worry about the money," said Mr. S., "I had no chance of paying it. I've destroyed the cheques."

He went on to relate how, not wishing to trust the Greek waiter with a large sum, he had sent a clerk to pay the banknotes into the hands of t.i.toff, at the Maritza. The clerk visited the little restaurant on the afternoon when t.i.toff waited in vain for Theodore. He dared not deliver the money there and then, for a Turk appeared to be watching the Russian engineer. When t.i.toff tired of waiting and went into the street the Turk followed, and shadowed him. The clerk, in his turn, trailed the Turkish agent un.o.btrusively. The three of them travelled in the same subway car from Galata to Pera. t.i.toff pa.s.sed into Taxim Gardens.

So did the agent and the clerk. He sat down and ordered a drink near the bandstand. The agent chose a table near him, and the clerk stationed himself within sight of both. At last, giving up hope of an opportunity to speak with t.i.toff, the clerk returned to Mr. S. and gave back the money.

Mr. S., meanwhile, had heard of the capture of Yeats-Brown, Fulton, and Stone, all of whom he had helped. He realized that he himself was in grave danger.

"I've had some sleepless nights over you fellows," he said to White. "I rather think I've been watched since the others were taken with Theodore, and I know your friend t.i.toff's watched. If Theodore blabs in prison, my neck will be almost as near the noose as his."

Mr. S., very rightly, was unwilling to advance us money for the present.

"The police want you badly," he pointed out, "and I'm probably a suspect already over Yeats-Brown and Company. If you're grabbed in Constantinople I want to be able to say with a clear conscience that I've given you no cash since you escaped. I shall know when the _Batoum_ is due to leave, and do my best to help you on the day before she sails, when you're all but out of the wood. The difficulty will be in finding a messenger. An English lady[1] helped the fellows who were retaken, and she'd like to take you the money. But she's involved over them and the police are watching her."

[1] Miss Whittaker.

Deeply appreciative of the great risks which Mr. S. was taking on behalf of not only us, but every prisoner who had tried to escape from Constantinople, White thanked him and left. At the top of the stairs he said good-bye to the _kava.s.s_ who knew him as a prisoner; at the front door he nodded to the porter who knew him as Mr. Henry O'Neill, of Tarsus. And so back to his role of paying guest on the _Batoum_.

With eased minds and renewed hope we continued to live in our wireless cabin, and prayed to Allah that the _Batoum_ would sail soon, and that Mr. S. would find some means of sending the money. Away in the distance we could see the citadel of the Turkish Ministry of War, in which Yeats-Brown, Fulton, and Stone were dungeoned. All Constantinople talked of the capture, and the word went round the cafes that Theodore was to be hanged as a traitor, for having helped enemy prisoners to escape.

Thereupon t.i.toff, mortally afraid for his own neck, wanted to get rid of White and me. He made our shortage of ready money an excuse for ordering us ash.o.r.e; but we claimed to have grown too fond of him to part company, and said that if we did leave the ship it would be to give ourselves up to the police, with the request that our friend and colleague Michael Ivanovitch t.i.toff should join us to prison. Michael Ivanovitch then protested, out of the kindness of his heart, that he would take us to Odessa whether we paid the full amount or only part of it.

So the anxious hours pa.s.sed, until at last the sickening period of delay ended with the arrival of a consignment of cargo. A succession of lighters left the quay and moored alongside us, and all day we listened with delight to the clatter and whirr of the winches as they transferred bales and barrels to the _Batoum_'s hatches. The final and infallible date of departure, announced the Turkish merchant who had chartered the ship for her voyage to Odessa, was September the twenty-second--four days later.

CHAPTER XIV

THE CITY OF DISGUISES

Constantinople, even at its most normal, has ever been a city of concealment--concealed motives, concealed truths and falsehoods, concealed cruelties and concealed persons. There, the way to a treaty, a change of government, a concession or a commercial contract is often through back doors and curtained corridors, with many a halt for whispered promises, whispered betrayals, and the handing over of _baksheesh_.

When normal life is upset by abnormal conditions the cauldron of crookedness bubbles over with a thousand and one conspiracies. Every other man is intriguing for himself, his safety, his pocket, his party, his family, or his government appointment, or from sheer inability not to intrigue. Such a period was the late summer of 1918, when we were disguised spectators of the misery and oppression that preceded the downfall of the Turkish Empire.

Four-fifths of the population, including the Turks themselves, were deadly sick of war and wanted peace at any price. They hated the Germans, and above all hated Enver Pasha and other Young Turk dictators, who ruled by violence with the support of the Germans. Only the politicians, the officials who lived by corruption, and the speculators were against a separate peace.

Many a time, before I escaped, I heard curses on Enver and on the Germans uttered by civilians, by officers, and even by guards. Once, when a party of us were sitting in Pet.i.ts Champs Gardens, a waiter brought with the bill for tea a slip of paper on which he had written "Vive l'Angleterre!" Later, dressed as a sailor and sitting in the cafes with Kulman, I often heard the same sentiments expressed.

Yet the miserable, exploited populace seemed powerless to impress its wishes on the Government. It was too disunited and too listless for action. A total lack of national consciousness made Constantinople a capital without a country. The population was a haphazard jumble of races, an _olla podrida_ of peoples that nothing, not even hunger and tyranny, could mould into a coherent whole. They murmured individually, but collectively they remained resigned and silent.

If circulation be the test of a city's vitality it proved Constantinople to be at very low ebb. All Mediterranean peoples move slowly in the streets; but the Constantinopolitans of 1918, I noticed, seemed to get nowhere; they crawled about aimlessly, or leaned against the walls and doorways in fatalistic inaction, _waiting for something to happen_.

In any case, the least attempt at organized protest was likely to lead to sudden disappearances. The dungeons of Stamboul jail were crammed with Greek, Armenian, and Turkish suspects; the infamous "Hall of Justice," in the Ministry of War, echoed the cries of prisoners whose interrogators extracted "information" by means of the bastinado. Open malcontents were hanged daily.

Every decent-living person was likely to feel the tentacles of Young Turk tyranny, as personified by Bedri Bey, Prefect of Police, and Djevad Bey, Military Governor of Constantinople. Only the unrighteous flourished. The speculation and graft were colossal, and beyond the most extravagant dreams of the British brand of war profiteer.

Everybody was on the make. Ministers and high officials received huge bribes, little politicians made little fortunes by acting as go-betweens, rich merchants manipulated so as to get hundreds per cent profit.

To take but a few of the swindles that I remember from my Constantinople days, there were: the Smyrna sugar _affaire_, involving the barefaced theft of twenty truckloads of a consignment from Austria; the tobacco swindle, which made three directors of the Regie very wealthy men within a month; the cocaine and quinine corner, engineered by a few Jewish speculators, so that for a time the doctors could obtain these drugs only at the price of a hundred pounds a kilo; the oil scandal, the wood scandal, and the widespread flour-adulteration scandal, whereby the lowest grade of bread, which was all that the poor could afford, became not only unnourishing but inedible.

There being no system of rationing, only the well-to-do could buy the dearer necessities of ordinary life. The poor remained sugarless, for example, because sugar cost from two pounds sterling a kilo; and the chances were that even when bought at that price it would have been mixed with powdered marble. Thousands actually starved; while the beautiful island of Prinkipo, with its summer palaces and villas, swarmed with oily, scoundrelly, enormously wealthy Levantine vulgarians.

Some of the Ministers traded openly. Enver Pasha and his a.s.sociates owned two of the largest shops in Stamboul. The Committee of Union and Progress, a vampire of corruption that drained the very life blood of Turkey, engaged enthusiastically in the orgy of speculation, and, by controlling the transport, ama.s.sed millions for their party. These sums the Committee had begun to invest in Switzerland and elsewhere as early as 1917; so that when the crash came Enver, Talaat, and other Young Turk leaders were able to abscond with bulging pockets.

The police, of course, shared in the plunder, and dabbled in every species of blackmail. They waxed fat on the system that ent.i.tled them to see the vecikas (ident.i.ty papers) of any able-bodied man at any time. As the city contained many thousands of deserters, without taking into account those who obtained exemption from military service by continued bribes to recruiting officers and gendarmes, this was a profitable responsibility. A forged _vecika_, properly stamped, cost anything from fifty to a hundred dollars. To buy off a policeman when unprovided with a _vecika_ was more speculative. A solitary gendarme, alone in a dark street, might be content to accept twenty-five dollars; whereas two gendarmes together could be persuaded only with difficulty to accept twenty, their mutual dignity and that of their official positions having to be maintained in face of each other.

The city was full of suppressed ident.i.ties. Deserters were as common as nuts in May, and so were disguises. An enormous game of hide-and-seek was in progress, with police _baksheesh_ as the forfeit for being caught.

When a rich man--Turk, Greek, Jew, or Armenian--was conscripted he could always pretend sickness, bribe the military doctor to send him to a hospital, bribe the hospital doctor who examined him, and finally bribe the medical board to give him leave. At the larger hospitals of Constantinople, such as Haidar Pasha and Gumuch Souyou, the recognized tariff was a hundred and twenty-five dollars for each month's leave, with pretended complaints suggested by the doctor by way of bonus.

The discontent and the misery twice showed itself in shots at Enver Pasha, as he drove through the streets in his Mercedes; but the bullets either missed him or flattened themselves on the chain mail which he was reputed to wear.

Otherwise its outward manifestation was confined to the spreading of rumours indicative of an early victory for the Allies. The "Tatavla Agency," so-named from a district inhabitated by Greek merchants, was the centre of anti-German propaganda. From it, even at the time of Hindenburg's last great drive, there spread the wildest reports of Ententist successes. Some, no doubt, were concocted to influence the Bourse; but the object of most was to encourage the starving population in their hopes for the downfall of the Young Turco-German regime.

No statement was too far-fetched to be believed in the bazaars and cafes. When the British aeroplanes renewed their bomb-raids on Constantinople, in the autumn of 1918, Yeats-Brown dropped hints that the attacks were not the work of the British, but were a display of German frightfulness, to show what would happen if Turkey's loyalty to Germany wavered. After an interval of weeks this beautiful lie was whispered back to him by a Greek, with well-imagined circ.u.mstances and details to make it the more plausible.

Captain Yeats-Brown and Captain Sir Robert Paul lived through the most extravagant adventures before the Turkish armistice found them still in disguised liberty. They first escaped with the help of Miss Whittaker, "the Edith Cavell of Constantinople." It was owing to her that, already before leaving the prison at Psamatia, they were well supplied with money and could look forward to a hiding-place. As prisoners, they had kept in touch with her by means of letters, five-minute meetings outside the British Church, and short conversations in the park, under the complacent eyes of a bribed guard.

One night they slipped through the window of their room in the prison-house, and having climbed along a narrow ledge, let themselves into the street with a rope. Wearing fezzes and with their faces stained brown, they walked to Theodore's house. Afterward they moved to the room prepared for them in Pera.

A few days later Paul, dressed as an Arab, left Constantinople with two Greeks. The party of three crossed the Sea of Marmora in a sailing-boat, landed on the northern coast, and began tramping toward the Gulf of Enos, where a boat awaited them.

Unfortunately for Paul the description of him, which the Ministry of War circulated, mentioned that he had a prominent stoop. A stranger with this peculiarity was found asleep in the church of a Greek village; and by arresting him the local gendarme earned (but probably never received) the reward offered for the British officer's capture.

Paul was brought back to the capital and dungeoned in the Ministry of War Prison.