CHAPTER XI

A GREEK WAITRESS, A GERMAN BEERHOUSE, A TURKISH POLICEMAN, AND A RUSSIAN SHIP

At half-past eleven of a scorching morning every Britisher at Psamatia marched away from the prison-house. As a result of the furore that followed White's escape, twenty-four hours earlier, the Turks were sending us into the interior of Anatolia. About fifty Tommies, with a detachment of guards, left first; and we--the fifteen officer prisoners--followed twenty yards behind them. In the rear was the Turkish officer in charge, with a screen of six guards, who showed fixed bayonets, loaded rifles, and smiling ferocity.

Three of us--Fulton, Stone, and myself--had made up our minds to slip away, or if needs be dash away, before the party entrained at Haidar Pasha, on the Asiatic shore of the Sea of Marmora. The Turkish officer rather expected somebody to make an attempt, but knew not whom to suspect in particular. A little deduction might have told him, for, except F., the "do-or-die trio"--as the others had named us--were the only officers wearing civilian clothes, and one would as easily have suspected F. of an ambition to become the Sultan's chief eunuch as of an ambition to escape.

Some of the Tommies were disabled or still sick. As they trudged through the hot streets, oppressed by heavy packages and the relentless heat, their backs bent lower and lower and they began to straggle. Finally one man fainted. While he was being carried into the shade the officers obtained permission to relieve the weakest Tommies of their kits. Yet again, the Turks ought to have discovered the escape party, for the others saw to it that Fulton, Stone, and I should not be burdened with the parcels.

Meanwhile, the mid-day heat grew more intense, and the Tommies more exhausted. It became necessary, every half mile or so, to rest for a few minutes on the shady side of the street.

The "do-or-die trio" looked to these halts for their opportunity; but always the guards hemmed us in too closely for any chance of a break-away. A combined effort seemed impossible, so that the three of us accepted the maxim of each man for himself. Even to talk with each other on the march was imprudent, for earnest conversation, like earnest looks, must have attracted attention.

The first move was made by Fulton. We had halted on a narrow pavement, in the suburb of Yeni-Kapou. There followed a short interval of lounging repose, during which we sipped at water-bottles, while the Turkish officer did his best to fraternize. Turning round casually, in a search for possible opportunities, I saw Fulton sliding into a little booth of a shop, and then, with head bent over the counter, looking at postcards. As far as I could gather none of the guards had noticed him. He killed time by calling for more and ever more postcards.

Five minutes later the order to continue was given. We rose and arranged our packs, while Ms. stood in front of the shop window, so as to hide Fulton. But a Turkish sergeant counted us, and finding our number short by one, became excited and aggressive as he wandered around and checked his figures. Fulton's discovery was then inevitable. He made the best of things, when observed through the window, by choosing and paying for several postcards and leaving the shop indifferently, as if he had entered it with no ulterior purpose. The Turkish officer looked his suspicion, but made no comments.

Stone's turn came next. At Koum-kapou we rested below the wall of an old palace. When, as he thought, nobody was looking, Stone slipped through a side-entrance and sat down against a doorway in the left-hand corner of the courtyard. A guard darted after him, and dragged him back to us. The Turkish officer saw the commotion and wanted explanations; whereupon Stone complained that although he went into the courtyard merely to find shelter from the sun the guard had hustled him rudely. The watchful guard was reprimanded for want of politeness.

We passed from Koum-kapou to Stamboul, where crowds of befezzed men and veiled women gathered at every crossing to gaze their dull-eyed curiosity. Here, in the mazed streets of the Turkish quarter, I again petitioned Providence for some sort of a diversion, under cover of which we might run. But nothing happened. The guards surrounded us as if we had been wayward pigs being driven to the slaughter-house, and handled their bayonets suggestively.

At one point we could see the Maritza, down a side turning. We moved along the tram-lines toward the big bridge. Then, after a moment's delay at the toll-gate, we passed over the Golden Horn.

Three-quarters of the way across the bridge the Turkish sergeant leading us switched the column-head to some steps descending to the ferry stage for the Haidar Pasha steamboats. The Tommies were placed at one end of the wooden stage, with a separate group of guards, while the Turkish officer, who since the beginning of the journey had shown a desire to make himself pleasant, took the officer-prisoners into a little café for cooling drinks. We talked idly to the Greek waitress who served us; but at the moment I was too preoccupied to notice anything about her, except that she was plump and obliging.

Later we were grouped some distance to the left of the café, in a corner of the ferry stage opposite that occupied by the Tommies. There we remained for nearly an hour in the broiling sun, while waiting for the steamer which was to take us from Europe to Asia. People surged on and off the ferryboats that moored opposite us from time to time; but never once did the guards relax enough to allow anybody to fade into the crowd. The chances were made even more desperate by some German soldiers, who leaned over the bridge-rails above us and watched the changing scene.

"Our ship comes," announced the Turkish officer at last, pointing out to sea in the direction of Prinkipo Island. In five minutes' time, I knew, the party would be on board that steamer; and once aboard it I should have left behind all hope of escape from captivity in Turkey. Only five minutes! Had the gods left _no_ loop-hole?

I searched among the crowd in every direction, ready to take advantage of the wildest and slimmest scheme that might suggest itself.

I heard Pappas Effendi and Fulton asking the Turkish officer if they might return to fetch some kit, which had been left in the café. The Turk nodded, and sent them away, escorted by his sergeant. I also had left some kit, I claimed on the spur of the moment, just as Pappas Effendi and Fulton were leaving us.

"All right," said the Turk, "follow your comrades."

In full view of the rest of the party I walked after Pappas Effendi and Fulton, and while keeping close to the sergeant, as if to show I was under his wing, took care to remain behind him so that he himself should know nothing of my presence.

The little group entered the café, first Pappas Effendi and Fulton, then the sergeant, and finally myself.

Inside the doorway was the plump waitress, who smiled affably. I stayed near her while the other three passed to the inside room, where we had been seated earlier. I fingered my lips warningly, and in soft-spoken French asked where I could hide.

The waitress gave no answer, but without showing the least excitement or even surprise, half opened a folding doorway that led to the kitchen. I planted myself behind it, while she entered the inner room and talked to the Turkish sergeant.

A minute later I heard the three of them--Pappas Effendi, Fulton, and the guard--tramp past my doorway and out to the ferry stage. Just then the arriving steamer hooted.

"Now," said this waitress-in-a-million, "they have gone, and so must you. The Turks may come any moment, and if they find you here I shall suffer more than you."

"Goodbye, and a million thanks," I said, fervently, and walked into the open.

Without even turning my head to see whether the disappearance was known I swerved to the right, and, taking great care not to attract attention by walking in haste, passed up the long line of steps leading to the bridge. I continued to look straight ahead, but I could sense the presence, only a few yards away, of the German soldiers who loitered by the railings. Fortunately, several other people were moving up or down the steps; and dressed as I was in a civilian suit obtained from the Dutch Legation, the Germans paid no more attention to me than to them.

I reached the pavement, and still not daring to look behind, crossed the tram-lines to the opposite side of the bridge. Then only did I turn round to find out whether I were followed.

Everything was normal. Not one of the idlers who lined the railings had noticed me; the usual traffic and the usual crowds ebbed and flowed across the bridge; the sun shone. I lit a cigarette and walked eastward.

Having crossed the circus of streets at the Galata end of the bridge, I turned to the right and made for the Rue de Galata. At the corner I looked back again. To my very great relief, I found that I was still not followed.

I was conscious of an intense exhilaration as, free at last, I rubbed elbows with the crowd of nondescript Levantines. It was the first time for months that I had ever walked the streets without the burden of an oppressive consciousness that a yard or two to the rear was an animal of a Turkish soldier. That sense of always being followed and spied upon and menaced and held on a leash had weighed so much on my mind that I had come to look upon a guard in the same light as an old-time convict must have looked upon the lead ball chained to his foot. The sense of freedom from this incubus was glorious.

I was worried about my chances of meeting the unknown Russian who had agreed to hide White and myself. According to the plan detailed to me some hours earlier by Vladimir Wilkowsky, he was to wait for me in a German beerhouse from two o'clock to four. I had been unable to escape in time for the appointment and it was now four-twenty.

Nevertheless, hoping that the Russian might have lingered over his drink, I decided to carry out the same arrangements as if I had arrived in time. These, I remember thinking as I strolled along the Rue de Galata, studiously unconscious of gendarmes and soldiers, were suggestive of a Deadwood Dick thriller, or of some sawdust melodrama at a provincial theatre.

Having entered the beerhouse (named _Zum Neuen Welt_), I was to pass down the main room until, on the right-hand side of it, I reached the piano. I must seat myself at the table next to the piano, order a glass of beer, put a cigarette behind my left ear, and look around without showing too much anxiety.

Somewhere near me I should find a man whose left ear, also, was adorned with a cigarette; or, if not already there he would arrive very shortly. He would occupy the table beyond mine--that is to say, the next but one to the piano. On no account must I speak to him in the beerhouse, although to make his identity doubly clear he might ask for a light, speaking in German. He would remain until I had paid my reckoning, then pay his own, leave the _Bierhaus Zum Neuen Welt_, and walk toward Pera.

I was to follow him not too closely, always taking care to be separated by a distance of at least twenty yards, so that nobody might observe how my movements depended on his. Arrived on the fringe of Pera he would unlock a door, leave it open, and disappear; whereupon all that remained for me was to follow him into this retreat, where I should find Captain White already installed.

It was four-twenty-seven when I entered the _Bierhaus Zum Neuen Welt_, a close-atmosphered café in the Rue de Galata. The customers inside it were few, but some of them caught my attention at once, for they included a group of German soldiers and a Turkish officer of gendarmerie, who was talking to a civilian. The table next to the piano was vacant, as were those surrounding it. I sat down, casually placed a cigarette behind my left ear, and ordered a glass of beer.

As I sipped the beer I looked around the room for the man of mystery. Nobody paid the least attention to me. Plenty of cigarettes were held in the hand or the mouth, but none in the cleft of the left ear.

Still with a faint hope that the Russian who was to hide me might return, I ordered a second then a third glass of beer, and made a study of every man present, in case one of them might be he. But nothing had happened, and nothing continued to happen. The officer of gendarmerie kept his back toward me, while the German soldiers grew boisterous over repeated relays of beer, and over mandolin strummings by a red-faced Unteroffizier. The proprietress, a German woman of an especial corpulence, dragged her fleshy body from table to table, and finally arrived before mine.

"You seem hot," she said in German. "You must have been walking too fast."

"No, I have merely been out in this atrocious sun."

"German?" she asked--at which I was delighted, for it proved that my accent, acquired many years before as a student in Munich, was not yet too rusty to pass muster.

"No, madam, Russian," I replied, hoping hard that she could speak no Russian.

"_So!_ Plenty of Russians come here since the Ukraine was occupied, and the boats began to arrive from Odessa."

Now although the fat proprietress had paid such a compliment to my German accent, I remembered the five years since I had spoken the language continuously, and I was frightened that in any word she might detect an English accent. I grew more and more frightened and anxious, for it was very unlikely that the man with the cigarette would arrive now. I looked at my watch, and found the time to be five-twenty-five.

Finally the tension of trying to think clearly while answering the German female's questions was more than I could stand. I paid my bill, and returned to the Rue de Galata.

By now, I judged, the guards must have discovered my escape. Probably they were searching the streets for me; and probably the gendarmerie in Galata, Pera, and Stamboul had been instructed to look out for a European in a gray civilian suit and a black hat. I stopped at the nearest outfitting shop, bought a light-gray hat, and left the black one lying on a chair.

Deciding that the water would be safer than the land, I made my way back to the bridge, with the intention of chartering a small boat for a trip up the Bosphorus.

Then, crossing the open space facing the bridge, I was horrified to see Mahmoud, one of my old guards. He revolved undecidedly and peered among the crowd. Obviously he was looking for someone; and the odds were a hundred to one that the someone must be me.

I edged away from him without being observed, and dodged into the fruit bazaar among the quayside streets to right of the bridge.

This bazaar was one of the dirtiest in Constantinople. Millions of flies drifted over and settled on the baskets of tired fruit. The very stalls seemed ready to fall to pieces from decrepitude. The people, vendors and buyers alike, were dusty and ragged. A few loiterers squatted on the cobble stones and sucked orange-peel.

It was inevitable that in such a place my more or less smart Legation suit and my newly bought hat should attract attention. A policeman, of the "dog-collar" species, seemed particularly interested in them. I was leaving the bazaar by a narrow street that looked as if it might lead me to the subway station of Galata when he barred the way and said something in Turkish, while holding out his hand expectantly.

I failed to understand most of the words, but one of them--_vecika_--was enough. _Vecikas_ were the Turkish passports with which every honest, or rich but dishonest, civilian had to provide himself if he wished to remain at liberty. They might be demanded at any time in any place by any gendarme.

Naturally I could produce no _vecika_. But I had the next best thing. That same morning I had discussed with Vladimir Wilkowsky the possibility of being stopped in the street by a policeman. His advice was that if it happened I must claim to be a German officer. I remembered being photographed in civilian clothes when at Gumuch Souyou Hospital; and before leaving Psamatia I gave myself a useful identity by signing one of the copies with a German name.

After searching an inside pocket, I now handed to the gendarme a photograph which went to prove that I was "_Fritz Richter, Oberleutnant in der Fliegertruppen_." Speaking [in fluent German, interspersed with a few words of broken Turkish], I protested violently that I was a German officer in mufti, and that he would get himself into trouble for having presumed to stop a German officer. And never was I more frightened than when uttering that bombast.

Half convinced and half browbeaten, the gendarme took the photograph, looked at it dubiously, and consulted a Greek from among the curious crowd that circled us. This man, it appeared, claimed to know German. I understood little of the conversation, but as far as I could gather the policeman asked if I really were a German officer; and the stallkeeper, reading the signature laboriously, informed him that it proclaimed me to be a Supreme Lieutenant of the Flying Soldiers.

"_Pek ee, effendi_," said the gendarme to me. He returned the photograph, salaamed, and apologized. He then went away. So did I.

I returned cautiously, through a combination of side streets, to the bridge-head, and I was much relieved to find that Mahmoud had disappeared. From the quay I chartered a rowing-boat, ordering the Turkish _kaiktche_ to row me up the Bosphorus.

"Are you Russian, _effendim_?" he asked.

"No, German," I replied, surlily. At that his conversational advances ended.

The train of thought started by the word Russian led me to decide that I had better spend the night aboard the Russian tramp steamer on which White and I were to travel as stowaways. Vladimir Wilkowsky, in fact, had told me to make for it if I failed to reach the hiding-place on shore, and to ask for M. Titoff, the chief engineer. Its name, I knew, was the _Batoum_, and most of its officers were in the conspiracy to help us, in return for substantial consideration. I knew that the ship was moored in the Bosphorus, but of its appearance or exact position I had been told nothing.

"_Russky dampfschiff Batoum_," I ordered the _kaiktche_, using the polyglot mixture which he was most likely to understand. But his voluble jabbering and his expressive shrug showed that he, also, was ignorant of where it lay.

"_Bosphor!_" I commanded, pointing higher up the Bosphorus and thinking that I would find the name _Batoum_ painted on one of the five or six ships that I could see in the distance, moored in midstream.

But having rowed some distance up the Bosphorus and already passed Dolma Bagche Palace, I found no ship labelled _Batoum_. Most of the craft seemed to use only numbers as distinguishing marks. What was worse, most of them flew the German flag; although two of the masts sported a yellow-and-blue standard which I failed to recognize. Certainly none flew the Russian eagle.

Our only chance of finding the _Batoum_ was to ask directions. We visited several lighters near the quay; but the _kaiktche's_ questions to Turks and Greeks were unproductive. As a last chance I told him to row close to a large steamer, on the deck of which I could see some German sailors.

"Please tell me where I can find the Russian boat _Batoum_," I shouted in German, standing up while the _kaiktche_ kept the little craft steady with his oars.

"Don't know the _Batoum_," said a sailor. "Here there are no Russian ships now. They've become German or Austrian."

"And those two over there?" I asked, pointing toward the vessels with the green-and-black ensign.

"Ukrainian."

"Thanks very much," I called as we sheered off. My mistake, I realized, had been in forgetting for the moment the existence of that newly-made-in-Germany republic the Ukraine. Any vessel from Odessa not flying the German or the Austrian flag would now be Ukrainian; and the yellow-and-blue standard must be that of the Ukrainian Republic. One of the pair flying this flag proclaimed itself to be the _Nikolaieff_. It followed that the other, which was marked only by a number, must be the _Batoum_.

Having made the _kaiktche_ take me to the bottom of its gangway, I climbed to the deck. At the top of the gangway was a tall man made noticeable by a bristling moustache and a well-pressed uniform of white drill. Obviously he was a ship's officer, and as such he must be one of the syndicate whom Captain White and I were bribing. If so, he would know of Wilkowsky.

"_Russky vapor Batoum?_" I asked in pidgin-Russian.

"_Da._"

"_Monsieur Titoff?_"--pointing at him by way of enquiry into his identity.

"_Niet; Monsieur Belaef._"

"_Droug Vladimir Ivanovitch Wilkowsky?_"

He gave me a long look, smiled, and said under his breath: "Yes, meester."

These were the only English words known by Ivan Stepanovitch Belaef, first mate of the Ukrainian tramp steamer _Batoum_, from Odessa. And for the moment, at any rate, I was safe among friends.

* * * * *

At about armistice time I was hailed unexpectedly in Port Saïd by C., one of the British officers whom I had left behind on the ferry stage of the Golden Horn. He himself had seen me leave the café, climb the steps leading to the bridge, and fade into the crowd.

A few moments after my disappearance, related C., the Turkish officer called the roll of the prisoners, before taking them to the ferryboat. That roll-call almost led to the premature discovery of my escape; for when the Turk said "À-lan Thòm-as Bott," _four_ people answered.