Part 23

The domes of San Sophia lay like rose-colored clouds above the cypress trees. Beyond was the great mosque of Suleyman, its minarets, white and slender, cutting the blue sky like lances. Further back, rising above a huddle of brown old houses, was the mosque of Mohammad, the conqueror who, five hundred years ago, rode into San Sophia on a day of victory, over the corpses there, and left the imprint of a bloody hand on one of the pillars where it is now sculptured in marble. White in the sun on the water’s edge were the long walls of the Sultan’s palace. One could see Galata, and the old bridge which crosses from Stamboul, and above, on the hill, Pera, with its Grand’ Rue, its night clubs, its cabarets, its Christian churches, and haunts of vice.

Before we anchored, our ship was surrounded by a swarm of boats, as at Athens, but these were the narrow caïques of the Golden Horn, rowed by Turks, who hung on by thrusting grapnel hooks through our portholes and by clinging on to ropes. They were old sun-baked Turks, with white beards, and young Turks with only down on their faces and roving eyes for the unveiled women on our decks, and together they raised a wild chant as they called “Effendi! Effendi!” and invited us to go ashore. Other ships passed us--a steamer crowded with Russian refugees fleeing from the Bolshevik pursuit of Wrangel, a British destroyer, sailing boats with leg-o’-mutton sails, billowing white above the blue water, and many of the little _caïques_ where, on Turkish rugs, sat Turkish ladies like bundles of black silk, deeply veiled, so that one had no glimpse of a face.

My young son and I, with light baggage, secured a _caïque_ with the fat American Jew, who had enormous cases of samples which nearly sank the boat when they were dumped in by the Turkish porters. We were rowed across the Golden Horn to the Customs office by two Kurdish boatmen, and there were seized upon by a crowd of Turks who fought each other for our baggage. In the customs office the Turkish officials were highly arrogant young men in uniform, who smoked innumerable cigarettes and refused to pass the American’s samples of boots and shoes until he had bribed them with some of his very best pairs. After that long delay we took a carriage and two horses and drove at a smart trot to the Pera Palace Hotel where I found my comrade of the war, Percival Phillips, and a bevy of English and American correspondents watching the secret progress of a drama which might result in another European war and set the whole East aflame. It was Phillips, as well as the High Commissioner, Admiral Webber, and various Intelligence officers, who “put me wise,” as the Americans say, to the situation which had its secret plot in Constantinople, but its fighting center in Angora. Here in “Constant” there was a mask of peaceful obedience to the decrees of the International Occupation. It was called “International,” and there were French and Italian troops and police on both side of the Galata Bridge, but the real command was in the hands of the British High Commissioner and the real power in the hands of the British fleet. The French were “huffy” because of that, and General Franchet de l’Esperay had left in a temper because he would not take orders from the British, and was up to his eyes in political intrigue. The Sultan was a puppet in the hands of the British, ready to sign any document they put before him, provided his personal safety was assured. But every Turk in his palace, and in the back streets of Galata and Stamboul, were rebels against his submission, and spies and agents on behalf of the Nationalist Turks in Angora. Those were the real fellows. They refused to recognize the Allied terms of peace, or any peace. They were contemptuous of the Sultan’s enforced decrees. They even denied his religious authority. They had raised the old flag of Islam and were stirring up fanaticism through the whole Mohammadan world as far as India. But they were modern in their ideas and methods, “Nationalist” and not religious in their faith, like the Irish Sinn Feiners who put national liberty before Catholic dogma. They were raising levies of Turkish peasants, drilling them, arming them (with French weapons!), teaching them that if they wanted to keep their land they must fight for it. There was a fellow named Mustapha Kemal. He would be heard of later in history as a great leader. He was raiding up the coast as far as Ismid, and little companies of British Tommies had had to fall back before his irregulars. Not good for our prestige! But what could we do on the Asiatic side, with only a few battalions of boys? Meanwhile, the Turks in Constantinople were sending money, men and munitions to the Nationalists, and there was precious little we could do to stop them, in spite of our troops and police. Why, there was gun-running under the Galata Bridge, almost as open as daylight! Mustapha Kemal’s strength was growing--nobody knew how strong. Perhaps it was underestimated. Perhaps one day the Greeks, holding a long line across Asia Minor for the protection of Smyrna, would get a nasty surprise. Who could trust a Greek Army, anyhow? And what was the British Government--that beggar Lloyd George!--doing with all their pro-Greek policy? It was doing us no good in the Mohammadan world. Even India was getting restless because their political agitators were pretending the Sultan was a prisoner and the Prophet insulted! Not that the Indian Mohammadans cared a curse about the Sultan really, belonging to a different sect. But it was all propaganda, and dangerous. The whole situation was full of danger, and Constantinople was a very interesting city in this time of history.

That was the gist of the conversation I heard from Phillips, and British Intelligence officers, and naval lieutenants, and travelers from the Near or Far East, in the smoking room of the Pera Hotel, which looked out to the Grand’ Rue with its ceaseless procession of Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Israelites, French and Italian officers, Persians, Arabs, Negroes, Gypsies, American “drummers,” British soldiers, and Russian refugees--the queerest High Street in the world, the meeting place between the East and the West, the unsafe sanctuary of those in flight from the greatest tragedy in the world, which was in Russia.

For one scene in this drama the dining room of the Pera Palace Hotel--a thieves’ kitchen in the way of fleecing the visitor--was an entertaining prologue. Rich Turks came here to listen to incautious conversations by foreign journalists, or irresponsible young middies from the British fleet lying in the Bosphorus, or to act as liaison officers between Mustapha Kemal and his political supporters in the sacred city. There was one Turkish family who dined here every day, the women unveiled as a sign of their modernism, and one of them so beautiful with her dark liquid eyes touched by kohl, that she had to sustain the gaze of young Christian dogs in naval uniform--and did not seem to mind. Greek and Armenian merchants brought their ladies here, dressed in Paris fashions by way of the Grand’ Rue de Pera, and light in their way of behavior, despite the glowering eyes of old Turks who watched them sullenly. Cossack officers who had lost their command, and all but their pride, came in full uniform, with black tunics crossed by cartridge belts, high, black boots, and astrachan caps. One of them was a giant with a close-cropped head like a Prussian officer, and a powerful, brutal face, but elegant drawing-room manners, as when he bent over the hands of lady friends and kissed their rings. These last fugitives from the last expedition against Bolshevik Russia lived gayly for a time on the diamonds they had hidden in their boots. Their motto was the old one: “Let’s eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die!” They gave banquets to each other while they had any means of paying the bill. That was easy while they had a few jewels, for in a private room at the Pera Palace were Jew dealers who would value a diamond ring with expert knowledge and pay in Turkish pounds. One general paid for his dinner party in a different way. At the end of the meal he took his wife’s fur tippet from her shoulders, handed it to the waiter, and said, “Bring me the change!”

Their own paper money was almost worthless in purchasing value, whether Czarist roubles, or Denikin roubles, or Soviet roubles. One of the Cossack officers ordered a cocktail, and paid 100,000 roubles for the little nip of stimulant.

Once or twice a week there was a dance after dinner at this hotel patronized by the younger officers of the British and American fleets and the society of Pera. Some of the women there were beautiful, though mostly too plump, which is the way of Greek ladies and Armenian, after a certain age. Their shoulders rose above their low-cut dresses. Young naval lieutenants winked at each other, sometimes danced with each other and said, “Hot stuff, dear child! Beware!”

In such a place, at such a time, there was no sense of the East, near or far, no reminder of the tragedies within a stone’s throw of the windows, no reminder of great menace creeping across the clock of Time to this city and its mixed inhabitants, no fear of massacre. Yet, when I went outside that hotel, by day, and often by night, I was aware of those things, smelt something evil here, beyond the noxious stench of the narrow streets. The Turks who slouched up the Grand’ Rue, or crowded the bazaars of Stamboul and Galata, had no love for the Christian inhabitants, civil or military. I saw them spit now and then, when British Tommies passed giving the glad eye to young Turkish women who let down their veils like window blinds hurriedly drawn.

Often I went down to the Galata Bridge with my young son, glancing often over my shoulder when there was any crush, because I did not want his young life ended by a stab in the back which happened sometimes, I was told, to soldier boys of ours. Beyond that bridge, where two Turks stood receiving toll from all who passed, was the beginning of the East, stretching away and away to that great swarming East which was held back from Europe by a few battleships, a few British regiments, and the last prestige of the European peoples, weakened by its internecine warfare. Could we hold back the East forever, or even the Turkish nationalists from this city on the Bosphorus? Across the bridge came Turkish porters carrying great loads at the nape of the neck, Persians in high fur caps, Kurds, Lazis, Arabs, Soudanese, negroes, Gypsy queens in tattered robes, smart young Turks in black coats and the red fez, Turkish women in blue silk gowns, deeply veiled. In the bazaars near by there were swarms of Turks, Armenians, and Jews, selling German and American goods, Oriental spices, Turkish and Persian carpets, dried fruits, shell oil. Around the mosques of Stamboul sat groups of Turks smoking their narghili and talking, between the hours when they washed their feet according to the law of the Prophet. Camel caravans, with mangy, tired beasts, heavily laden, plodded down narrow streets, and their drivers had news to tell, exciting to little groups of Turks who gathered round. What news? What excitement?... There were hidden emotions, passions, secrets, among these people, at which I could only guess, or fail to guess.

I thought of a story I had heard of the Reverend Mother in a Catholic convent here in Constantinople. She had a Turkish porter at the convent gate, an old man who had been a faithful servant. She asked him if he thought there would be any rising in the city among the Turks, and, if so, whether her convent school would be respected. “Do not be afraid,” he said. “When the massacre begins I myself will kill you without any pain.” He promised her an easy death.

There was, I thought, only one safeguard against massacre in this city seething with racial hatred. It was the fear of those young British soldiers, with their French comrades, and sailor cousins, who kept order in Constantinople. It was a fear inspired mainly by British prestige. We had no great strength at that time, as far as I could see, less than two full Divisions of infantry--mostly boys who had been too young to fight in the Great War--and some Indian cavalry, Mohammadans like the Turks. In the Bosphorus, it was true, there was a considerable fleet, led by the Iron Duke, and some American warships, but a rising in Constantinople, an attack on the European quarters, would lead to dirty work. There would be many Christian throats cut.

The British troops did not seem nervous. They are never nervous, but take things as they come. At the upper end of the Rue de Pera there were numbers of wine shops and dancing halls where they gathered in the evenings. As I passed them I saw groups like those with which I had been familiar in the estaminets on the Western front. They were singing the same old songs. Through the swing doors came gusts of laughter and those choruses roared by lusty voices. In Constantinople as in Flanders! The Y.M.C.A. was doing good work in keeping them out of temptation’s way, down back alleys, where Greek girls waited for them, or where Turkish ladies hid in the dark courtyards. On the whole they gave no great trouble to the “red caps” who rounded them up at night. The American Jacks gave more. Coming from “dry” ships, they drew a bee line for the booze shops, and were mad drunk rapidly. The British A.P.M. with whom I went round the city one night, had the genial permission from the American Admiral to have them knocked on the head by the naval police as quickly and smartly as possible. It was safer for them.

I shall never forget one of those young American sailors whom I encountered at a music hall close to the Pera Palace, known as the “Petits Champs.” A variety show was given there nightly, by Russian singers and dancers with a Russian orchestra, and it was crowded with all the races of the world which met in Constantinople. Some of the dancing girls had been ladies of quality in Russia. Now they showed their bodies to this assembly of wine-drinking men and evil women, of East and West, for the wages of life. The orchestra played Russian music with a wild lilt in it--the rhythm of the primitive soul of the old Slav race. It worked madness in the brain of the young American Jack, who sat next to me, with one of his petty officers. He was a nice, sweet-faced fellow, but with too much beer in him to withstand this music. For a time he contented himself with dangling his watch in his glass of beer, but presently his body swayed to the rhythm, and he waved his handkerchief to the ladies on the stage. Then he seized a great tin tray from a passing waiter and danced the hula-hula with it, with frightful crashes and bangs. No one took much notice of him. The petty officer smiled, as at a pleasant jest. Our own sailors were merry and bright, and there was a great noise in the cabaret of the Petits Champs.

There was no noise, but a kind of warm silence, if such a thing may be, in a Turkish house on the hillside overlooking the Bosphorus, where my son and I took dinner with a young English merchant and his wife. It was an old wooden house called a “palace,” with a broad balcony above a little tangled garden. Down there among the trees with a little old mosque with one minaret, and far below the British fleet lay at anchor, mirrored in the glasslike water. The spearheads of black cypress trees in our garden pointed to the first stars of evening in a turquoise sky, faintly flushed by the rose tints of sunset. Beyond, the Asiatic shore stretched away, with the lights of Scutari clustered at the water’s edge below the slopes of Bulgaria, and clear-cut against the sky rose the tall white minarets of Buyak Djami, the great mosque built in honor of Mirimah, the daughter of Suleyman the Magnificent. A band was playing on one of our warships, and its music came faintly up to us. When it ceased, there was a great silence around us, except for the flutter of bats skimming along our balcony.

The young English merchant--the head of the greatest trading house in the Near East--sat back in a cane chair, talking somberly of the stagnation of his business owing to the effects of war and the failure of peace. He was anxious about the Nationalists in Angora. That fellow Mustapha Kemal--The Greeks might not have the strength to hold Smyrna! Every Turk had vowed to get back Smyrna at all costs. It was the worst wound to their pride. The future was very uncertain. Damned bad for trade. What was going to happen in Europe with all these race hatreds, political intrigues, jealousies between French and British, Italian and French, Greeks and all others. Venizelos had claimed too much. More than Greece could hold....

He was newly married, this young merchant of the Near East, and his wife was beautiful and restless, and rather bored. She liked dancing better than anything in the world, and had enjoyed it on the Iron Duke with young British officers. Her merchant husband was not keen on it--especially when his wife danced with those young naval officers, I thought. He was a little annoyed now when she brought a gramaphone on to the balcony and set it going to a dance tune and offered her arms to a boy who had brought the latest steps from London--my son. While they moved about to the rhythm of a rag-time melody, the young merchant continued his analysis of a situation ugly with many perils and troubles, and then was silent over his pipe. From the garden came another kind of music as the rose flush faded from the sky and the cypress trees were blacker against a paler blue. A white-robed figure stood in the little turret of the minaret and turned eastward and raised his voice in a long-drawn chant, rising and falling in the Oriental scale of half-tones. It was the imam, calling to the Faithful of the Prophet in the city of Mohammad. It was the voice of the East as it has called through the centuries to desert and city and camel tracks, to the soul of Eastern peoples under this sky and stars. It rose above the music of a gramaphone playing rag-time melody, and called across the waters of the Bosphorus where Western battleships were lying, with their long guns, like insects with their legs outstretched, as we looked down on them. Faintly from the shadow world, and through this warm-scented air of an evening in Constantinople, came answering voices, wailing, as the imams in each minaret of the city of mosques, gave praise to God, and to Mohammad his Prophet.

“The Turks aren’t finished yet,” said the young English merchant. “And behind the Turk is Russia--and the East.”

A chill made me shiver a little.... The sun had gone down.

With Percival Phillips, sometimes, we visited the mosques and explored Turkish street life on the Stamboul side of Constantinople, and went up to Eyoub and the Sweet Waters of Europe, and wandered among the charred ruins of a quarter of the city where a great fire had raged. Once, with the young commercial traveler in vests and pants--three years before an officer in the Great War--we walked to lonely districts where the Indian cavalry had pitched their camps beyond the city and when in a little Turkish coffee shop, remote and solitary, some wild Gypsy women in tattered robes of many colors, through which could be seen their bare brown limbs, danced and sang. No need to ask the origin of the Gypsy folk after seeing these. They were people of the Far East, and their songs had the harsh and ancient melody of Oriental nomads.

“Not particularly safe to wander far afield like this,” said the young commercial traveler. He told stories of Turkish robbers and assassins in the outskirts of the city. But no harm befell us.

In narrow streets off the Grand’ Rue de Pera, we came into touch with another aspect of life in Constantinople--the heart of the Russian tragedy among the Royalist refugees. Those people had arrived in successive waves of flight following the defeat and rout of the “White” expedition under Denikin, Wrangel, and others. The luckiest among them, who had jewels to sell and a business instinct, had set up little restaurants and wine shops in Pera. Somehow or other many of them were able to get enough money to eat and drink in these places, and they were always filled with Russian officers in uniform, with their ladies. Those who served were often of higher rank than those who dined, and a score of times I saw an officer rise, bow profoundly, and kiss the hand of the waiting girl before he ordered his _bortsch_. Probably she was a Princess. One could hardly order a cup of tea in Constantinople without receiving it from a Russian princess or at least a lady of quality in the old régime. I had a pork chop handed to me by a bald-headed man with an apron round his waist whom I knew afterward as the Admiral of the late Czar’s yacht. His fellow serving men were aristocrats and intellectuals, wearing white linen jackets and doing their job as waiters with dignity as well as skill. Poor devils! In spite of their courage and their gayety, they were having a rough life in Constantinople with no hope ahead, except the fading dreams that Soviet Russia would be overthrown by some internal plot or foreign intervention. In spite of all the millions lent to Russia by Great Britain, and all the arms and ammunition supplied by us to Koltchak, Denikin, and all the “White” Armies, they regarded England as the chief cause of their repeated failures, and as a nation which had not helped their cause with proper loyalty. It was the one-time Admiral of the Czar’s yacht who made this complaint to me, and said, “England has betrayed us!”

That evening I sat with a young British naval officer in the Pera Palace hotel and heard the other side of the story. He had been looking angrily at some Cossack officers and their ladies, laughing over their coffee cups.

“I’m not bloodthirsty,” he said, “but it would give me the greatest pleasure in the world to cut one of those fellow’s throats.”

He told me the cause of his bitterness--the inefficiency, the corruption, the vanity, the damned selfishness, the jealousy of those White officers. We had sent out vast stores of arms and ammunition, but they never got to the front. Crowds of these fellows, swaggering about in uniform, never went near their wretched men in the trenches, and were hundreds of miles behind, gambling, drinking, indulging in amorous adventure. The women were just as bad, many of them. Worse, if anything! We had sent out consignments of clothes for the Russian nurses, who were in rags at the front where they were looking after the wounded. That underclothing, those stockings, and boots, and raincoats never reached the nurses. They had been seized and worn by the female harpies hundreds of miles behind the line. He had more respect for the Reds than for this White rabble. One day the British taxpayer would want to know why we were keeping thousands of them in the island of Prinkipo and elsewhere....

I went out to Prinkipo, and did not feel the bitterness of that young officer who had no patience with our charity. A boatload of refugees, with a crowd of women and children, had just arrived and were sitting among their bundles and boxes on the quayside, forlorn, melancholy, sick after a long voyage across the Black Sea, and after the horror of flight from the Red Terror. We could not let them starve to death without a helping hand.