At the time when we lived on board the Batoum as stowaways her officers and crew were rogues almost to a man. Except Titoff and one or two of the crew they were likeable rogues, however, and applied an instinctive sense of decency to their unlawful dealings. For example, Andreas Kulman, the Lettish third mate, would cheerfully cheat the Turkish merchant who had chartered the vessel, and cheerfully smuggle drugs from anywhere to anywhere; but I never knew him cheat a friend or a poor man, or take advantage of a stranger in difficulties. To us, as prisoners escaping from Turkey, he showed many kindnesses; and if we had been without money he would have been willing to take us across the Black Sea without payment. The other mates were of the same type, if a trifle less obliging.
The second and third engineers—Feodor Mozny and Josef Koratkov—were among the few of our shipmates who could not be classified as rogues. They transgressed only to the innocuous extent of smuggling moneyed stowaways and contraband goods. They, also, showed White and myself many kindnesses; as did the second engineer's wife, who voyaged with her husband. Several evenings she spent in the heat of the frowsy little engine room, washing our only underclothes, while we sat in Josef's cabin, clad in nothing but the tunic and trousers of our Russian-sailor disguises.
We wore these disguises for the benefit of visitors to the Batoum, and not to throw dust in the eyes of the crew. That was needless, for, except the captain, every man belonging to the ship soon knew of us. The marvel was that with so many people privy to the secret it never leaked to the Turkish police. In pro-Entente circles ashore our presence on the Batoum was widely known and widely discussed; and I count it a debt to Providence that the news was not carried to the Ministry of War by one of the city's many police spies. The crew were unlikely to betray us knowingly, for every man of them must have been concerned in something which might wither in the strong light of a police investigation. Besides, they were tolerant of the British, while disliking the Turks even more than they disliked the Germans.
The captain—a white-bearded, bent-backed Greek of about eighty—seemed incompetent, and well on the way to senile decay, but withal harmless. This voyage was to be his last before enforced retirement. He was as wax in the cunning hands of Titoff, who kept from him the knowledge that two escaped Britishers were aboard. Had he known he would have either insisted on our removal, or—more probably—demanded a large share of the passage money. It was easy to keep the ancient in ignorance, for apparently he knew less than anybody else of what happened on his vessel. Titoff assured us that should the captain see us in our disguise of Russian sailors he would remain unsuspicious if we took care not to speak. His declining mind had become too feeble to remember off-hand even the number of the crew; and much less could he remember their faces. Once I brushed by him closely, outside Kulman's cabin. He passed without a glance at me, looking on the ground and muttering into his beard.
The crew was a dubious mixture. Many—in particular the firemen—had been Bolsheviki until Austro-German forces landed at Odessa and Sevastopol and temporarily crushed Bolshevism in South Russia. Other ex-members of the bourgeoisie, but unable to make a living on land under present conditions, had become temporary seamen by the grace of friends connected with the shipping company that owned the Batoum. There was also a bright youth named Viktor, who, until the Bolshevist revolution, was a student. His father, a lawyer, had been killed in the rioting at Kieff that accompanied the Soviet rise to power; and the son, to keep himself alive, now swabbed the decks of a tramp steamer and submitted to being kicked by sailors and corrupted by Michael Ivanovitch Titoff. Viktor spoke French and German, and was therefore much in request as interpreter when the ship's officers bargained with their stowaways or invested in contraband consignments, or when one of them brought on board some cosmopolitan wench from Pera or Galata.
Our most interesting shipmate on the Batoum was perhaps Bolshevik Bill the Greaser. One afternoon when White, dressed in sailor's clothes, was helping to paint the ship's side, a hard-faced giant in overalls approached him, produced a Russian-French grammar, and asked for a lesson. So far as his slight knowledge of French and slighter knowledge of Russian allowed, White did his best to comply. Thereafter the greaser became a close friend, following us round the deck in the evening, visiting us at odd hours during the day-time, and bringing us figs.
Like most of the greasers and firemen he was a Bolshevik. He was not a bloodthirsty Bolshevik, however, but one who, according to his own limited and crude conceptions of universal equality, wanted plenty of wealth, plenty of happiness, plenty of vodka for all. He was especially eloquent and brotherly when drunk.
Others of the Bolsheviki were idealists of a more exterminative type. Once, when White was playing cards with some firemen in the engine room, the talk swung to the Russian Revolution. A lean man, who until then had been too busy drinking to speak, began to describe the mutiny in the Baltic Fleet, of which he had been a sailor. In his intensity he seemed to live again through the horrors of it, as with gloating gesture he described how unpopular officers had been thrown into the sea with weights tied to their feet.
"That was bad, very bad," protested White in his halting Russian. "If you are in power and somebody has done wrong, he should be given a fair trial and, if convicted, put in prison. But to kill men merely because you dislike them is very wrong."
"Well said!" commented Bolshevik Bill the Greaser.